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OF CALIFORNIA AND NEVADA 


BY RUTH UNDERHILL, Ph. D. 

II 

ILLUSTRATED BY VELINO HERRERA (Ma-pe-wi) 


Edited by Willard W. Beatty, Chief, Branch of Education (1936—1951) 


1941 


PUBLISHED BY THE BRANCH OF EDUCATION 
BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS 




























WHAT THIS PUBLICATION TELLS ABOUT 
THE NORTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS 


WHO AND WHERE 

Where Do the Paiute Live? . 7 

Who Are the Paiute? . 8 


HOW AND WHAT 

How Did They Get a Living?. 10 

What Did They Live In? . 10 

What Did They Wear?. 15 

What Did They Eat?. 17 

The Vegetables . 17 

The Meat Supply . 23 

How Did They Cook? . 25 

What Did They Make?. 26 

Basketry .. 27 

Skin Dressing . 33 

Pottery . 35 


LIFE IN THE BAND 

Did They Have Any Government?. 37 

How Did They Fight? ... 39 

How Did They Play?. 39 

Dances . 41 

How Did They Make Music? . 43 

Did They Ever Travel? . 43 

What Did They Know?. 44 


LIFE IN THE FAMILY 

Birth . 45 

Education . .*.-... 46 
























Coming of Age .. 47 

Marriage ..... 48 

How to Get On With Relatives-in-Law . 49 

Death .... 49 

LIFE AND THE GODS 

Visions . 51 

Medicine Men ... 52 

Ceremonies . 53 

Tobacco .. 53 

PAIUTE HISTORY 

Escape Early Explorers . 55 

United States Acquires Area. . 56 

The Ghost Dance.. 57 

New Indian Schools.... 58 

Indian Reorganization Act ...... 59 

Carson Indian Agency.... 63 

BIBLIOGRAPHY . 67 

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS _______ 69 

INDIAN LIFE AND CUSTOMS BOOKS..... 71 




















Plots 1. Map showing distribution or the Paiuts. 














































































































































































THE NORTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS 


WHO AND WHERE 


WHERE DO THE PAIUTE LIVE? | In the western part of the United 

States, between the Sierras and the 
Rockies, is a stretch of dry, barren country which was cne of the hardest 
possible areas for Indians to live in. It is called the Great Basin because the 
mountains wall it in, almost like the rim of a bowl, and no rivers can run out 
of it to the sea. Such streams as there are sink away in the sand or form 
lakes which shrink and grow salty in the dry air. But there are not many 
streams, for the mountains keep away the rain. You can travel through the 
Basin for miles seeing nothing but sand and rock and sage brush. If you drive 
through Death Valley, one of its hottest and lowest parts, you will see only 
sand and rock. 

Once the Basin really had water in it. That was some thousands of 
years ago when the glaciers of the Ice Age were melting and streams ran 
down the mountainsides to form great lakes, thirty or more miles long. Great 
Salt Lake is all that is left of one of the largest, and year by year it is growing 
smaller, leaving a rim of dry white salt which covers the desert for miles. But 
there are smaller lakes of the same sort, for the Great Basin is cut by low 
mountain ranges into dozens of little basins, each with a lake at its bottom. 
Some of the lakes are fresh and still full of fish, because they have some out¬ 
let. Some are salty and shrinking, some are swamps, and some just flat 
places in the ground. Around them stretches the sage brush where no ani¬ 
mal seems to live but the rabbit. In the greener places grow some seed plants 
or roots which can be eaten. In the hills there are pine trees with nuts in 
their cones. This was what the people of the Basin had to live on. No forests 
to give wood; few large animals to give skins, either for clothes or for tents; 
few fish; few birds. 

Compare this life with that of Indians in the eastern forests, who had 
fur and skins to wear, logs for houses, bark for canoes and game, birds and 
fish in almost every square mile of their country. Or think of the Indians 
of the prairies who had thousands of buffalo to give them skins for tents, for 
robes, for moccasins and bags, and all the meat they could eat. In contrast 
with these whom we might call "rich" Indians, the people of the Basin were 


7 


poor. They had about as little to start with as any group in either of the 
Americas. Yet they learned to use everything. The study of their life gives 
an amazing picture of what can be done with seeds, bark, roots, even insects 
end wa' r er scum. The implements they made out of the desert bushes were 
the most efficient possible for their purposes. In fact, they are an outstand¬ 
ing example of the way to make the best of the environment. 

WHO ARE THE PAIUTE? fHow did they happen to choose such a 

country? That story is lost in the past, like 
the movements of so many Indian peoples. Students have divided the Ameri¬ 
can Indians into various groups, according to language, and when the con¬ 
nections between the languages have been worked out, more may be known 
about the history of the people who speak them. At present it is known that 
the people in the Basin and around its edges all speak one general language. 
It is called Uto-Aztecan and it is spoken by scores of tribes along the high¬ 
lands of western America, from the Ute in Colorado to the Aztec in Mexico. 
The fighting Comanche speak it, the peaceful Hopi, the Mission Indians of 
California, the farming Pima of Arizona. Of course these people do not all 
understand one another and it takes a student to see just how their languages 
are alike. Even the Basin people do not all understand one another. They 
seem to speak three different languages though these are all branches of 
the general language, Uto-Aztecan. 

We need not go into these languages too deeply, though the map 
on page 6 shows where the lines between them are drawn. They have some¬ 
times been called Northern Paiute, Southern Paiute and Shoshoni. These 
are chance names, given by White people and we cannot even be sure of 
their meaning. The Indians themselves often use some word like Num, which 
means People. There is no Paiute or Shoshoni tribe. The people 
go about in little groups which are nicknamed according to their way of 
life: Salmon Eaters, Pine Nut Eaters or White Knives. The habits of each 
differ slightly, because each has a different way of getting a living. It would 
take a long time to describe them all, so we will pick two groups that are 
better known than the rest. These, as it happens, are both Northern Paiute 
and both live at the edge of the Basin in California. The country is not so 
poor as the deserts of Nevada and Utah, but their way of life will still give us 
a good idea of the clever ways used by Basin people to get food. 

Lock at the western edge of the map, which is in California. In the 
sou'.h, you will see the Owens Valley Paiute, living around a small body of 
water ca'led Owens Lake. Their name for themselves is Num, meaning "the 
people." In the north, are the Surprise Valley Paiute, whose home is in Cali¬ 
fornia, stretching into Oregon. They call themselves Groundhog Eaters. The 
following pages describe these two groups as they were when the White people 
first entered their country. Today, however, if you visited the Carson Agency 
of the Indian Bureau, which includes both Owens and Surprise Valleys, you 


would see a very different picture. You would find the Indians living in 
wooden houses, wearing blue jeans and cowboy hats, driving wagons or even 
trucks. You would find some old people who could still describe the ancient 
ways, but the young ones would look very much like young White people. At 
the end of our narrative we shall note the changes which have taken place 
and give some picture of the Paiute today . 



Plate 2. Hafted stone ax. 




THE NORTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS 


HOW AND WHAT 


HOW DID THEY GET A LIVING? (Of course the first question was 

food, just as it was with all Indi¬ 
ans. If they could find enough food in a place, then they could settle down 
and get something or other that would do for clothes and a shelter. Just 
as the White man looks for a job, so that he can support his family, the Indian 
looked to the resources of the country for enough to support his family. The 
resources of the Basin must have been hard to see at first and we wonder how 
the Indians ever found them. There were, of course, rabbits on the desert, 
the fish in the lakes and sometimes ducks and mud hens. But these were 
not nearly enough to keep a family alive for the year. All the growing things 
must be watched and picked, one after another, as they ripen. 

In the spring, there were green plants in the marshy places. In 
summer there were wild seeds, tiny little things which most people would not 
dream of trying to grind into flour. Later, there were berries and, if a 
good wet place could be found, there might be roots. In the fall came the 
big crcp which really kept the Basin alive: pine nuts. These tiny nuts, no 
bigger than grains of wheat, grow under the leaves of the cones on several dif¬ 
ferent kinds of pine trees. Some can be found in one part of the Southwest, 
some in another. But in the Basin the tree above all others for pine nuts is 
the scrubby little pinon. It grows on all the hillsides and, in some years, 
bears dozens of pounds of nuts, which are both nourishing and delicious. 
Still, would you care to live on them for an entire winter? Many Basin people 
did just this, and since they needed huge stacks of the nuts they simply moved 
where the trees were, picked them clean and stored the harvest, then camped 
nearby until it was eaten up. 

WHAT DID THEY LIVE IN? ( Naturally, people whose food was scat¬ 
tered all over the country, could not have 
a permanent home in any one place. Instead of bringing food to their house, 
they brought the house to the food. Sometimes they would be in a valley, 
sometimes in the mountains, sometimes by a lake, sometimes out in the des¬ 
ert. In each place they put up some boughs for a framework and covered them 
with whatever they could get: reeds, branches, mats, even a deerskin if they 
had such a thing. The place where they stayed the longest was the winter 
house, cuddled in the warm valley. But no valley was very warm in winter be¬ 
cause the Basin is really high land, though its wall of mountains makes it 
seem low. 


10 


The Paiute winter house was often built over a pit about two feet deep. 
(Of course the Indians did not measure in feet, nor even care very much about 
accurate measurements. Those are for people who buy materials from a 
factory, all cut to size.) The pit was roughly circular and anywhere from ten 
to twenty-five feet across, depending on the size of the family. Its bottom 
furnished a good smooth floor, without the sticks and stones to be found on 
the surface of the desert and avoided the drafts that blew along the ground. 
Its sides furnished two feet of wall already built. 

Around the edge of the pit, the Paiute men planted poles, with their 
butt ends in the ground and their tops slanting in toward the center. They 
tied the tops together with strips of bark and the irregular opening where 
they joined was the smokehole. If the house was very large, the tops would 
not meet. Then two, or four poles were placed in the center of the pit, with 
rafters across them. The outside poles leaned against these rafters. The 
result might be a gable or even a small flat roof. 

All the fastening was done with strips of sage bark. The poles were 
tied together at the top, or tied to the rafters. Then some lighter poles, 
probably of willow which bends easily, were tied around them outside. Next 
the "shingling" went on. We speak of shingling because overlapping bunches 
of grass were attached much as shingles are used on modern houses. It is 
an ancient idea, used by the people in many parts of the earth, before boards 
were thought of. The Paiute took saltbush or reeds or anything they could 
find and tied it together in bunches, with all the ends pointing the same way. 



Plate 3. Winter home. The sweat house was on the same plan but larger. The log framework 
was covered with boughs cr woven mats, which in turn were covered with earth to keep out 
drafts, 


I ‘ 


11 







,1 

Plate 4. Cross section of the Paiute summer house or, on a smaller scale, of the sweat house. 



Plate 5. House covered with cattail mats. 

Then they tied the bundles to the framework of the house, beginning at the 
bottom. They let the ends of the leaves or grass all point downward, so as 
to shed the rain and they tied on row after row, each one overlapping the 
one beneath it, just as shingles do. They left a narrow opening for a door, 
but had no windows. When they wanted to close the door, they tied several 
bundles of grass together and stacked them against it. The hole at the top 
where the poles were tied together was never covered, for that had to let the 
air in and the smoke out. Beneath it, on the earthen floor, was a little hollow 
for the fireplace. 


12 


















This was the simplest form of winter house but naturally people 
changed it according to what they had. Where cattails grew, they could make 
these into mats and have a wall covering almost as good as skins or canvas 
or tar paper. You may see such mats on old Paiute houses today and perhaps 
you might prefer to call them fringes. The women who made them laid the 
cattails in a row with the thick ends up. Then they made holes through the 
ends with a sharp piece of bone and ran a piece of bark string through them. 
Sometimes they fastened the lower ends too, as you may see in the picture 
on page 12. fhe mats were laid on like shingles too, and the long straight 
cattails were fine for shedding water. If they wanted the house warmer and 
more airtight, they could throw earth over the outside. This was always done 
with a special big building made in Owens Valley, and used as a place for 



Plata 6. Summer shack. 


men to meet. The Men's House is an institution often to be found in North 
America from the snug, underground Kiva of the Pueblo Indians to the big 
stone "singing house" of the Greenland Eskimo. Often it is, as with the Owens 
Valley Paiute, not only a club house, but a place to take a bath. The bath 
was provided not by soap and water but by the men's own perspiration. They 
built a big fire in the center and closed the doorway, letting the room gef as 
hot as they could bear. When they had sweated well, they ran out and plunged 
into cold water. No better system could be devised for keeping clean under 
difficult conditions. The only pity is that the women did not take sweatbaths 
too. 


13 






Women sometimes had another kind of house, just as they did in 
many parts of America and in the Old World too. This was a roughly made 
shack, away from the main house where they went once a month when they 
were thought to be dangerous to men. Surprise Valley women did this and so 
did many in the Basin, though sometimes, as in Owens Valley, they were not 
so particular. 

The sweat house and the winter house were the most important 
dwellings the Paiute had and were used year after year. When people were 
travelling and camping, however, they did not put up such a solid dwelling. 
They used a framework of boughs, cone shaped, dome shaped, or gabled. 



Plate 7. Man in buckskin breechcloth and sagebrush bark sandals; the wDman in sagebrush 
skirt, her chin tattooed. The oldest form of costume. 


14 



























Sometimes they merely tied a few branches together. There was no end to 
the makeshift forms which might be used, according to the materials at hand 
The picture on page 13 shows one common form. 

WHAT DID THEY WEAR? ( If building materials were hard to get in 

the Basin, clothing materials were even 
scarcer. What are people to do in a country where there are very few deer, 
no buffalo and not even the small fur animals like fox, and muskrat? Men 
often solved the problem by going without any clothes at all; but women, as 
in all Indian tribes, wore at least a skirt. They made it of sage brush. This 



Plate 8. Paiute man and woman in fringed buckskin, the later form of costume. 


tough, scrubby little bush covers the plains for miles and White people think 
it has no merit at all except its spicy smell. But the Indians ate its tiny seeds 
and stripped its rough bark to make their clothes. Who but Basin people could 
have thought of it! The bark is so broken that it does not even come off in 
strips but the women dampened it and pounded it with stenes until it formed 
strings. These they made into a wide fringe that reached from the waist to 
the knee; that was their skirt. Sometimes they had not time to do all this 
and old people tell how they might then take the green scum formed over a 
place where a pond used to be. It was as light as paper and tore just as 
easily but it would do when a woman was busy. 


15 

















When they could get deer, that was another matter and in the two 
valleys we are speaking of, Owens and Surprise, they often could. However, 
they did not develop the art of tailoring very far, so the clothes they made 
were very simple. A man might wear a simple strip of deerskin between 
his legs, pulled over a belt front and back. At Surprise, where it was colder, 
he had leggings which were just tubes of deerskin, attached to his belt with 
thongs. He might also have a shirt made kimono-fashion without sleeves. 
A woman, when she could have a deerskin skirt, thought herself very well 
dressed. At Owens Valley, she made it in one piece, in wrap around style, 
and sometimes she sewed deer hoofs around the bottom to rattle as she 
walked. At Surprise Valley, she sometimes had a whole dress, made of two 
deerskins sewed together, with a hole for her head. In cold weather, people 
needed something warmer and they tied whole animal skins over their 
shoulders or around their waists. Also they had the rabbitskin blanket, the 
great luxury of the Basin, which we shall describe later. Children, for the first 
few years of their lives, wore nothing at all and when they were older, dressed 
like their fathers and mothers. 

People who travelled as constantly as the Paiute, had to wear some¬ 
thing on their feet. If they could get deerskin, they made moccasins, some¬ 
times sewed up on one side, and sometimes in other styles. They used the neck 
of the deerskin because it was tough and if they could get raccoon skin, that 
was even better. But also they used the faithful sage bark. They stuffed it in¬ 
side the moccasins to keep their feet warm. They wove it into big sandals 
which they wore like rubbers to keep their moccasins dry. Later, they made 
great rough overshoes laced up the front with bark string and worn over the 
moccasins in snowy weather. One who had not seen these things could hardly 
imagine that the tough, scrappy sage bark could have so many uses. 

For people who wore so little clothing they paid a great deal of atten¬ 
tion to their hair. Indeed, the long black hair of men and women was almost a 
garment in itself. Both sexes wore it in two braids, tied together and flung 
back behind the head. Women, who carried the loads for the family needed 
a hat of sorts to protect their foreheads from the carrying strap. They made 
themselves a bowlshaped cap which was like a basket and could actually 
be used as such. Men needed no hat unless it was cold, then they made a 
cap of skins, of the kind that early American pioneers learned from the 
Indians. 


Decoration was the most important part of the costume. Women 
tattooed their chins for beauty, generally with up and down marks. They 
rubbed red paint along the part of their hair and for special occasions, men 
and women both rubbed red and yellow clay on their faces in all sorts of 
designs. Both sexes wore necklaces and earrings. They knew nothing about 
metal work and, though Nevada is full of gold and silver, they never used 


16 


them. But they were very ingenious in finding things that would do: the hol¬ 
low bones of swan wings, deer toes and rabbit toes, black deer hoofs and 
even ocean shells, brought all the way from the Pacific. A woman, dressed 
for a holiday, with her necklaces and earrings and her skirt edged with 
rattling deerhoofs, was a rhythmic orchestra as she walked along. 

WHAT DID THEY EAT? j The Paiute knew their country. They knew which 

seed patches would ripen with the. crescent moon 
of July (only they did not call it July); which with the half moon; which with 
the full moon. They knew that when seeds are ripe, they must be picked within 
eight or ten days or they will blow away and be lost. They knew when every 
root patch must be dug before the tops withered away; when the rabbits were 
fattest; when the fish spawned; and the crickets came. Sometimes these 
various events happened miles away from each other and a family had to keep 
on the run, with everybody working. Under such conditions, there was no 
question of man being the food provider, while woman sat at home. Both were 
providers, but there was a rough division of labor. Men did the strenuous work 
of hunting and women did the day-by-day backbreaking work of picking the 
wild growing things. In that way, they could camp near their work and have 
the babies with them. 

THE VEGETABLES: ( A Paiute woman's picking began in the early spring, 
when the first green leaves showed in the valley. Then 
she crawled out of the winter house where the family had been living on the 
last of their dried vegetables and put on the paraphernalia she Would wear all 


p f.'\ 



^(s>% 


Plate 9. Paiute woman gathering wild seeds. 


I ‘ 


17 


summer: her cap and basket. The basket was a huge affair of willow, shaped 
like an inverted cone and capable of holding five or six bushels. She wore it on 
her back out of the way, sustained by a rope which passed from its two sides 
over her forehead or her chest. A tumpline, campers call it. Of course she 
could not have the rough rope pulling across her forehead with nothing under 
it. So she made herself a little cap in the one technique she had: basketry. 
The cap was shaped like a bowl and fitted snugly to her head. With this and 
her skirt, moccasins and basket, she was equipped. All she needed besides, 
was a stick to dig the roots or a fan to beat out the seeds. The baby was almost 
as much a part of her costume as the rest. She placed him, in his cradle 
board, on top of the basket, hung him on a tree while she was working and 
finally carried him home on top of the load. 

She began with the succulent shoots of onions and other spring greens. 
Those who criticize the Indian diet of mush, forget how many of these wild 
substitutes for lettuce they found. And they ate them, too. Then the family 
moved to the grasslands. There was much more grass in the Basin some fifty 
years ago than there is now and in all the moist places grew plants whose 
bulbous roots made a substitute for carrots, turnips and potatoes. One of these 
was the comas, whose lovely blue flower is one of the beauties of northwest¬ 
ern meadows. Another was the wild onion. But to the Paiute woman, 
these meant not a dash of color in the landscape but a month's job of digging 
and baking. 

Those who are used to baking their potatoes in the kitchen oven, may 
wonder how the Basin woman baked without any stove. She made her own 
oven, with the help of some other women and it was nothing more than a pit 
in the ground. On its floor, the women built a fire and laid stones in the 
flames to heat. The fire burned out and left the stones hot as the floor of an 
iron oven. On them was laid grass, then the roots, then more grass and more 
roots. Every woman placed her roots separately, walling them in with a wad 
of grass. Earth on top sealed up the hole and kept it warm all night. It was 
an efficient, large scale, fireless cooker. 

Now she moved on to the fruits. These, in the Paiute system were not 
a mere dessert—they were the whole meal. The family lived on them while 
they lasted and every day the picker "put up" some for winter use. The put¬ 
ting up was mostly drying in the sun but the chokecherries, she pounded, 
stones and all, into a paste. Then she molded the mass into little cakes. Dur¬ 
ing winter, she could grind the cakes into flour and mix it with the family 
gruel. 

She made refreshing drinks, too. None of them were intoxicating, for 
very few Indians north of Mexico knew anything about fermentation. She had 
tea from chokecherry stems or wild rose stems or mint or the famous Morman 
tea. Really it should be called Paiute tea, for it was the Indians who taught 
their Morman visitors to boil these leafless green stalks and make a beverage. 


18 


She even had sweets although the gum she picked from a certain kind of reed 
was not very sugary. And she had chewing gum! Gum, in fact, is an old Amer¬ 
ican institution, taucjht to the Whites by the first residents. Indians made it 
out of all sorts of plants but the Paiute used a certain rubbery root or else pine 
pitch. The pitch is brittle after a winter's freeze but, in the warmth of the 
mouth, it becomes elastic like modern gum. 

In late summer there was a special delicacy, hardly a vegetable but 
gathered like one. This was the crickets. They came out in swarms and, in the 
cool mornings they could be found bunched in the grass and picked up by 
handfuls. When a woman went out to gather them she built a fire and while 
she was getting her crickets she let it die down. Then she dumped the live in¬ 
sects on the coals by handfuls. Some women left them only a few minutes and 
some let them roast for hours. The family ate them immediately and any that 
were left over could be dried and kept. Ants and insect larvae were gathered 
in the same way. The larvae were cooked like the crickets but ants were dried 
and ground into flour like seeds. 

That brought the year around to seed gathering time, the most impor¬ 
tant season of all. The daily meal on which the family lived was gruel; gruel 
was made from flour and flour from wild seeds. This must have been the earli¬ 
est form of flour, before the human race learned that seeds could be planted 



Plate 10. Woman winnowing seeds under the arbor outside her home. 


19 













































Plate 11. Gathering pine nuts. 













and cultivated. The Paiute had not learned this but those in Owens Valley, at 
least, had found out that seeds could be helped to grow. They turned the 
streams into patches where they found seeds specially thick: a sort of irriga¬ 
tion without planting or hoeing. 

Their seeds came from all the withered flower heads which farmers 
throw out of their gardens as weeds; sunflower, pigweed, clover, cress, even 
marigold and primrose. To get enough of these into her basket, the woman 
had to have other tools than her bare hands. So she made herself an open¬ 
work beater of basketry shaped like a small tennis racket. With this, she beat 
plant heads, showering out the seeds by hundreds into the faithful carrying 
basket, held in her other hand. Even so, it took-a day's work tp get the basket 
even partly full. 

When she got home, she had some bushels of seeds of all kinds mixed 
with leaves and stems. She sifted out the extras with a very neat utensil, an 
openwork basket in the shape of a sieve. Now she had to get the husks off the 
seeds. She laid them on her grindstone and rolled them lightly with another 
stone or perhaps she pounded them a little in a mortar. That loosened the 
husks. To get rid of them, she put the mass on a tray—basketry again—and 
jerked it quickly so that the light husks flew out and the heavier seeds re¬ 
mained. All this to get them ready to grind! And they could not be ground 
even yet because they were too soft. She put them in another of her all-service 
baskets with some hot coals, shook the basket rapidly so the coals would not 
burn it and thus heated the seeds crisp. Now she could kneel down at her 
grinding slab and spend a few hours grinding them into flour. It was steady 
work but it was outdoor work, without haste or strain. Old women remember 
with pleasure those roving days, and their present problem, now that their 
men want more to eat than the old time seed gruel, is to work out a life that 
is as healthful. 

With autumn, the woman's food gathering job was practically over. 
She had dried and baked her surplus as she went along but she still had to see 
that it was handily stored for winter. She did her storing in cellars, not of brick 
or concrete but perfectly efficient. They were nothing more than pits dug in 
the ground at any point where she had been gathering. She lined the pits care¬ 
fully with grass, then laid in the sun-dried vegetables and covered the hole 
with earth. That kept her store dry and safe from marauding animals. When 
the family was ready to go into winter quarters, it made trips to the different 
caches and brought home the store. 

Before winter came, however, the whole family went out for the great 
crop of the year and the great crop of the Basin, pine nuts. The scrubby little 
pinon tree which bears them, happens not to grow in Surprise Valley, but it is 
found near Owens Valley, and over many of the hills in Nevada and Utah. It 
is a tricky tree One year it bears nuts, then for two or three years it bears 
none at all. Sometimes there is a big harvest in one place and nothing else for 


21 



Plate 12. Paiute rabbit hunt. 















































twenty miles around. Wherever the harvest was, there the people gathered, no 
matter how far they had to walk. If their homes were too far away, they did 
not gg back to them but stayed where they were until they had eaten all the 
nuts. 


Owens Valley was rather unusual, for there the people had their own 
groves and did not allow any trespassing. They had a head man who decided 
when they were to go nut gathering, and they started off armed with baskets 
and mats for carrying the nuts. Men and women both worked. Men pulled the 
cones down off the trees with wooden hooks, tied to long poles such as you see 
in the picture. Women spread mats to catch the cones, gathered them up and 
carried them to camp. Then their work began. They had to dry the pine cones 
in the sun just as they dried seeds. Then they put them into a pit and beat 
them until the nuts fell out along with some dirt and dust. Lastly they shook 
the nuts in a basket until the dust was blown away. Sometimes, instead of sun 
drying, they roasted the cones all night, covered with boughs and earth. But 
they did not prepare all the cones at once. They stored them in a pit lined 
with skins and took out just enough for one meal at a time. Sometimes the 
Owens Valley people got enough pine nuts so they could camp in the hills all 
winter. They lived on nuts and the game that men brought in. 


THE MEAT SUPPLY: ( With winter, the woman's season of food providing 

was over and she could sit down to handicraft. But 
the man was coming to his most strenuous period: no food would be brought 
into the house in winter except the game he killed. Moderns think of the 
primitive hunter as roaming alone over the hills with his bow and arrow. But a 
man who needed meat had more efficient means of getting it than this. The 
bow and arrow was mostly for impromptu occasions. In his regular planned 
work, he knew the haunts and seasons of all the animals and he arranged 
nooses and traps which would work for him all the time. These brought him 
in rabbits and birds. For large animals like deer, the Surprise Valley hunter 
dug a pit and roofed it over with boughs, so that the deer would fall in and be 
at his mercy. Little creatures like rats and ground squirrels he chased into 
their holes and then twisted a stick in their skins to pull them out. 

In the same way he sometimes pulled out the big lizards, called chuck- 
wollas and even snakes, if the food supply was low. However, he never killed 
any creature unless he needed food. "I have never shot anything in my life 
but what is good to eat," said one old Paiute. "In my way of thinking and in 
my father's way of thinking, no man ought to kill anything unless it is good to 
eat." 


Much more could be done, however, when all the men worked togeth¬ 
er. This they often did for that great meat supply of a treeless country, the 
rabbit. Far more efficient than a single noose, they found a long net or several 


23 


nets strung in a line across a patch of land where rabbits came to feed. Sev¬ 
eral men held the net while the others drove the rabbits in from all directions. 
Their heads, with the long ears, caught in the net and the men clubbed them 
or the women pulled them out and twisted their necks. For geese and mud- 
hens, a good plan was for a man or two to get on a raft in the lake and scare 
the birds to shore. There the others with some women to help, hit them on the 
head with sticks as soon as they arrived. 



Plate 13. Raft of reeds for hunting ducks. 


But the big game, so important that they held a ceremony for it, was 
deer and antelope. These could be hunted at any time of the year and they 
were, by stalking, by pitfalls, by driving them over the edge of a cliff, by chas¬ 
ing them into a corral and slaughtering them. In Surprise Valley this last kind 
of slaughter took magical preparation. It was performed for antelope in the 
winter when they ran in large herds. 

A man who had supernatural power, directed the people. They built 
a huge corral with wide wings, into which the antelope were to be driven. They 
sent out scouts to look ahead for a herd and, when they had reported one, 
they performed magic to bring it to the corral unfrightened. The magic was to 
make a bundle the size of an antelope, tied with sagebark string. The magi¬ 
cian took a stick wrapped around with hair and made music by rubbing it on 
this string, while magic songs were sung. Next day all the men went out to 
circle the herd and never failed to drive them into the corral. There, as they 
stood still, they were shot with bow and arrow. 



Plate 14. Left to right, twined seed beater, twined burden basket, and twined 

seed beater or fish scoop. 


24 




















































































For fishing, they had other inventive methods. They used a rod and 
line but the line being thick and the hook a clumsy one of bone, they did not 
work too well. It was much better to drive fish into nets as they drove the rab¬ 
bits or to throw into the water, a weed (Smilacina sessifolia or slim Solomon), 
which stupefied the fish without spoiling their flesh for eating. They dragged 
openwork baskets through the water to scoop the fish up, or they stabbed 
them with three pointed spears or shot them with arrows. At times, they 
turned aside a stream to irrigate their wild plants and left the fish stranded. 

There were no animals kept about the house for food but there were a 
few pets. Some people had very small dogs which looked like coyotes. They 
helped in hunting groundhogs and, now and then, deer and if the meat supply 
got low enough, they might be eaten. Men who needed feathers for their ar¬ 
rows caught nawks and eagles when they were young and kept them in little 
brush houses. 



Plate 15. Left to right, coiled basket dish, coiled boiling basket, and coiled dish. 


HOW DID THEY COOK? ( A few of the Paiute made some very rough pots 

but most had none at all. Then how did they 
cook? The answer may seem strange to people used to cooking in metal pots 
over a stove but to the Paiute and to many other Indians, it was simple. They 
cooked in baskets. These could not, of course, be placed directly over a fire 
but there are ways to get food hot in a basket without doing that. 

A Paiute woman who wanted to boil porridge, would take a close 
coiled basket and fill it with cold water. As the basket strands grew wet, they 
swelled, as all twigs do. Soon every crack filled up and the basket was almost 
as water tight as a pot. Meantime, the woman had been heating her cooking 
stones. These smooth round stones, of a kind that did not crack easily, were a 
regular part of her kitchen equipment. She placed them in the campfire, let 
them get hot and then removed them with a pair of long wooden tongs. They 
were probably covered with ashes so she dipped them quickly into water to 
wash them. Then she put them in her boiling basket and stirred them around 
with the tongs so that they would not burn it. This needed care but it was part 
of the science of Paiute cooking: a good cook never let her basket burn. When 
the stones got cool, she had hot ones ready to take their place and soon the 
porridge boiled. This art of stone boiling must be a very old one, dating from 
the time when few of the human race had pots. Many Indians use it, whether 
their container is a basket, a wooden box or an animal hide. 


25 







Plate 16. Left to right, twined water bottle lined with pine pitch to make it 
water tight, twined grater, and twined winnowing tray. 


Basket roasting was another scheme on the same order. We have men¬ 
tioned in connection with flour grinding, how the woman heated her seeds by 
shaking them in a basket with hot coals. This was another case of bringing the 
heat to the basket instead of the basket to the heat. She used it for all the 
small things that needed a quick roasting. Meat was too large and needed 
more fire than she could put in the basket so she laid it in the ashes or stuck 
it on a stick by the fire. Fish she could cook merely on the heated ground. 

For long roasting, such as she had to give the tough roots, there was 
the pit oven. This had all sorts of variations, from hot stones in the pit to fire 
cn top. They gave different amounts of heat and so furnished a way of regu¬ 
lating the oven according to what was being baked. 

Her utensils for preparing the food were mostly baskets. People who 
are used to metal and china can hardly realize that graters, sifters, bottles, 
spoons and dishes can be made perfectly well out of willow shots, but the 
Paiute woman, who had no other material, managed this very skillfully. She 
had a loose-woven tray for a sieve and one with roughly fastened knots for a 
grater. She made ladles and waterbottles and bowls of tight woven willow. She 
coated her water bottles with fresh pitch, since they must be carried far and 
must not leak. She did not provide her family with spoons but simply made the 
mush so stiff that they could use their fingers. 

The only other material she had was stone. She used that for the big 
rough block on which she ground her seeds to flour by rubbing them with a 
smooth, smaller stone. The things that needed pounding, she put in hollow 
stone or a tree trunk, hollowed out by fire. Then she pounded them with a long 
stone as a pestle. She did very little cutting but when it was necessary, she had 
a thin piece of stone with the edge chipped sharp, as a knife. 

WHAT DID THEY MAKE? ([Naturally the chief craft of the Paiute was 

basketry. So it is with many American In¬ 
dians with other peoples all over the world. Basketry needs no tools but the fin¬ 
gers, helped now and then by a bit of stick or bone. 


26 










































BASKETRY: ( Basketry materials can be found in all sorts of places, wet and 
dry, hot and cold. A woman out gathering plants could always 
find some sort of grass, twigs or reeds out of which she could weave a contain¬ 
er. Perhaps that is why women seem always to be the basket makers. They are 
ihe plant gatherers and they are the ones who need containers in their house¬ 
keeping and cooking. They must have made baskets from very early times for 
we find scraps of basketry in old caves, long before we find pots or cloth. In 
fact, basketry may be the oldest of the human arts. 

It is quite a complicated art. People who have not studied baskets of¬ 
ten have the idea that they are all made in the same general way but that is 
not the case. Try putting some basketry strands together and you will soon see 
that there are two main ways of doing it. One is a little like sewing, one is a 
little like weaving. Some basketmaking peoples use one method for every¬ 
thing, whether it is convenient or not. Some use the other and some use both. 
The Paiute, who were basketry specialists, used both. 


Try first the method which is like sewing. Try is the word, for no one 
can possibly understand a description of basketry unless he gets a few twigs 
or scraps of raffia and feels the motions with his own fingers. We should really 
say her fingers for, as mentioned above, basket making is a woman's art. First 
you want the foundation which will be twisted around in spiral shape to form 
the basket. This may be a bunch of soft grass, as it is in some desert countries, 
or a flexible twig, or two, or three, or even more. The size and strength of this 
foundation will make all the difference in the size and strength of your bas¬ 
ket. If you took twigs, they would have to be split and kept wet and would give 
you a great deal of trouble. Take a bunch of grass or raffia and wind it around 
in a spiral as you work. You will hold the spiral together with a light strand of 
raffia or grass. Pull this over one round of the spiral and poke it under or 
through the one below. Here you will need a sharp stick or bone to make a 
hole big enough for the raffia to pass through. You might almost be sewing 



Plate 17. Left, coiling in process. Right, twining in process. 


except that your needle is not attached to your thread. This method is called 
coiling. You can always recognize a coiled basket because of the spiral lines, 


27 











go ng ro'jnd and round, parallel with basket rim. The coils may be covered by 
the l pright stitches which, perhaps are in different colors and make a pattern. 
Nevertheless the ridged look is always there. 

You can see it easily in the coarse coiled baskets which the Paiute 
made. These were generally of willow; smooth, peeled shoots for the founda¬ 
tion strands and other shoots, split fine for the sewing. The Paiute woman 
used a splinter of deerbone for her sewing or, where cactus grew, she could get 
a large thorn which was the next thing to a needle. However, she did not do 
much coiling. She found the method useful for food bowls and, once in a while 
for large cooking baskets. She decorated these by doing part of her sewing 
with black fern roots or the red roots of a water plant. Sometimes she made 
paint out of pounded rock or willow root and painted designs on a white bas¬ 
ket. This was a very unusual form of decoration. It should be easy, but few In¬ 
dians used it. 

The basketry method which the Paiute used oftenest, was the one akin 
to weaving. In this, the foundation strands, instead of going around in the 
same direction as the basket rim, stand at right angles to it, like the ribs of an 
open umbrella. Take a few straight flexible sticks (for in twining, your foun¬ 
dation must be rather stiff; you cannot use raffia, as in coiling) and tie them 
together in the form of a sunburst. Then take two strands of softer material, 
like grass or raffia. Place one of these over a foundation stick, one under it 
and weave them in and out crossing each other every move. 

This is called twining. Twined baskets never have the ridged look of 
coiled ones—they look much more like a basket weave in heavy cloth. In fact, 
if twining is done with very light materials, it can be almost as flexible as 
cloth and can be used for bags. We shall see how cleverly the Paiute use it. 
Twining was the Paiute woman's chief method of making her utensils, clothes 
and furniture. 

Her carrying basket was in cone shape, sometimes three feet high, 
close woven for seeds and small things, openwork for large ones. Her boiling 
basket was a bowl, her trays and seed beater were fan shaped like the segment 



Plate 18. Left to right, basket cap, coiled basket dish, and basket cap. 


28 















of an umbrella. The parching tray and winnower, of course, were close woven 
to hold the seeds but the seed beater was openwork and so were the sieve and 
grater. One of her cleverest pieces of work was the water bottle. It was globe 
shaped, like a carafe, with a very small mouth stoppered with grass. It had to 
be absolutely watertight for sometimes it carried all the water for the whole 
family on a day's journey. So the woman took some sticky gum from the pine 
or juniper tree and dropped some pebbles in it. When they were coated, she 
dropped them in the bottle and shook them around. To coat the outside, she 
smeared on the gum with a stick. Her basket scoop for dipping out gruel she 
coated in the same way. She even twined clothing. That was the method for 
the basketry cap, which kept the rope of the carrying basket off her forehead. 
Indian women of several western tribes wear a cap of this sort, which is noth¬ 
ing more than a basketry bowl, turned upside down. Probably they got the 
idea from a bowl in the first place, though some of them made changes as 
time went on. The Paiute cap was just a simple bowl, with decorations painted 
on. No one knows why the women started to paint their decorations, instead of 
weaving them in, like the tribes around them. The painted cap, however, is a 
Basin specialty. Another form of woven clothing was the skirt. In the olden 
days, this was merely a fringe made of strips of sage bark, doubled over a belt 
and held in place by two or three rows of twining. 

The Paiute woman also twined the baby's cradle. This was in the usual 
Indian form, a board-like contrivance on which the baby could be strapped. 
The baby's grandmother made it by laying down a row of willow shoots just 
the length of the baby. Underneath them, she laid a backing of other shoots 
going in the other direction. Then she twined the two layers together with 
string in different patterns, a zigzag for girls, parallel lines for boys. Over the 
baby's head was a little semicircular awning of twined willow. 

We have mentioned string. Anyone who has camped or moved knows 
how essential this is for carrying loads and fastening bundles, and particularly 
where there are no nails, hooks or buttons. The Paiute used it to tie the mats 
or thatch on their houses, to attach the woman's carrying basket, to tie up 
loads for carrying and in making all their wickerwork. 



Plate 19. Left to right, water bottle covered with pine pitch, twined carrying basket, 
for roots and large objects, and twined ladle. 


29 











Plate 20. Cradle boards. Left to right, for a girl (zig-zag decorations on hood), buckskin 
covered board as made in the north, and board for a boy (parallel stripes on hood). 


Making string, with most Indians, seems to be the man's business and 
from that it often follows that he does spinning and weaving and other tasks 
which are now thought of as the work of women. That was the case with Pai- 
ute men. They got their string fibre from any tough plant that grew near 
them. Sometimes it was sagebrush bark, sometimes nettle or another plant. 
It was chewed or moistened somehow, then pounded, then pulled into shreds. 
Then the man twisted it into two-ply string by rolling two strands of it up and 
down on his thigh. If he wanted rope, he took several of his twisted strings 
and braided them. 

The first thing to do with the string was to tie together willow rods in 
various ways for bird and rabbit traps. You could make one of these yourself 
or, perhaps you have already done so, when you wanted to catch some small 
cnimal with the least possible work. The simplest way is to make a noose of 
string and attach it to a stake or a bush which can be bent over. Bend the 
stake until the loop lies on the ground, where the animal will step into it with¬ 
out noticing. Now you have to keep the stake bent. Tie another string to it and 
wind this around a peg in the ground with a little stick at the end. Place this 
little stick also in the ground, where the animal will be likely to kick it as he 
walks into the noose. As soon as this happens, the string unwinds, the flexible 
stake flies back to position and the noose, which has been lying on the ground, 
is pulled up around the animal's leg or neck. 

Every Paiute man made a few snares of this sort and placed them in 
the game trails around his camp. But snares only caught one animal at a time 
and, since the animals were usually rabbits or squirrels, this gave very little 


30 







































































for the family pot. So if the man could manage it, he sat down to the real job 
of looping a huge net, about three feet high and fifty feet long which would 
catch dozens of rabbits at once. Very few men had the time to make such a 
thing and generally these were old people, no longer busy with active work. 

After a rabbit drive, they had not only meat for the pot—or the basket 
—but fur for clothing. Fastening a few dozen rabbit skins together for a gar¬ 
ment may not sound easy to you, especially if the fastening has to be done 
without needle or thread. But Paiute men found a practical way. It is known 
to many Indians and old relics show that it must have been used in the Basin 
for almost a thousand years. The idea is to make the little skins into a rope 
and weave them. There are various ways of doing this and the different groups 
of Paiute did it differently. All skinned their rabbits so that the skin came off 
in one piece. This they cut spirally into a single strip. Then two strips could be 
laid together or one strip could be doubled but, in any case, the hide was 
twisted into furry rope, with no skin showing. This was used for the foundation 
of a blanket and strips of bark or fibre were woven through it. 




Plate 21. Left, a loom for rabbitskin blanket with horizontal warp. Right, 
another form of blanket loom. 

There were all sorts of weaving frames. The main point of a weaving 
frame or loom is that there shall be two firm bars, with the foundation of the 
cloth, which is usually called the warp, stretching from one to the other. The 
bars may be upright, with the warp wrapped from side to side; they may be 
held, somehow, in a horizontal position, with the warp going up and down or 
they may lie on the ground, with the warp across them. The Paiute used all 
these ways. In the picture, you see an old man of Owens Valley, weaving on 
an upright loom, with rabbitskin rope as the warp. His loom bars are about six 


31 


















P ate 22. Twining a rabbitskin blanket with vertical warp. 

feet apart and he has wrapped the rope around them from side to side, begin¬ 
ning his wrapping from the bottom. Now he is running the string through 
them, lengthwise. We might speak of this process as weaving, but actually he 
is not separating the warp and running threads through it in the same way 
that the Navajo and Hopi do. When you read about that process in another 
book of this series you will see that it is quite a complicated one. The Paiute, 
however, is really doing the same thing that women do in basketry. He has 
two threads and he is twisting one over and one under in the way we have 
called twining. Blankets and baskets, with the Paiute, were made in the same 
way and, if we were accurate, we should not call it weaving at all. However, 
the blankets produced by twining were delightfully soft, warm and light. You 
can prove this for yourself, for they are being made to the present day and can 
be bought. You cannot, however, buy the other kind of robe which was made 
in former days: the blanket of feather rope. This was made from the skins of 
mud hens, a kind of duck found in the Basin lakes. The skins were cut in spi¬ 
rals, then twisted and woven as if they were fur. The blankets they made must 
have been as light as a modern down comforter, without its silk or cotton cov¬ 
ering. Both kinds of blanket were used as robes in cold weather and sometimes 
for bedding. But they were too valuable to be laid on the rough dusty ground 
so the men made a sort of mattress out of hanks of sage bark, twined with 
string. 


32 
























Generally it was old men who did the weaving, for the young ones had 
their hands full with hunting and fishing. For this work, they had to make 
their own weapons. Every man had at least two bows, one for large game, one 
for small. He chose a piece of good hard wood, such as oak, juniper or moun¬ 
tain mahogany, cut a piece about three feet long, and split it in two. The flat 
side would be the inside of the bow, the curve, the outside. He whittled it so 
that it tapered at the ends and made knobs for attaching the bow string. If it 
was a bow for large game, he took some fish glue and fastened a strip of deer 
sinew along the back to make it strong. If it was for small game a mere wood 
en bow would do and that was the sort he gave his little son to practice with. 
He made his bow string from two strips of a deer's leg tendon which he 
chewed soft and then twisted, as he twisted string. Since deer were hard to 
get, we can imagine that a bow string was a valuable thing. When not in use 
the bow was kept out of the way of the children and one end of the string was 
always unfastened from the bow, so that it would not stretch or the bow lose 
its spring. 

The man-made arrows, of cane or willow, straightening them carefully 
in a grooved piece of stone which he heated in the fire before drawing the ar¬ 
rows through it. If they were cane, he used a piece of hard wood at the end to 
hold the point. He put the feathers on in some way so he would always recog¬ 
nize the arrow, for the man who killed game had the right to dispose of it. For 
fish, he did not use feathers: the arrows were more like darts. For large game 
or for men, he sometimes poisoned the tip by letting a rattlesnake bite it or by 
dipping it into rotted meat. 

He made himself a quiver out of a whole animal skin, sewed up and 
dried in its original shape. 


SKIN DRESSING: fin the sage brush country, there were few animals much 
bigger than a rabbit. But in the mountains of the Basin, 
there were deer and some of the Paiute could get them. This was the case in 
Surprise Valley, where the people got enough skins to make deerskin clothes 
and to learn the art of skin dressing. They practice it still and make beautiful 
things, as several groups of Paiute now do. We guess that they may have 
learned from people outside the Basin who used, in the old days, to have more 
deer. But many of these other Indians have changed and forgotten their old 
arts while the Paiute now make and sell some of the best buckskin goods in 
the West. 


33 


Plate 23. Tools for cleaning and scraping skins. 


Skin dressing, with them, is a job for women. This was the case with 
many Indian tribes where the men were often away hunting, so that the work 



Plate 24. Paiute woman wringing out a hide. 


34 








































of caring for meat and skins had to be left to the women. The Paiute woman 
was away just as much as the man but nevertheless she became the skin 
dresser. She had an enormous task: scraping the hide with a bone tool, wash¬ 
ing it, wringing, then softening it by rubbing in the oily brains of some animal, 
then pulling and stretching the soft skin into shape. Finally, she smoked it 
over a fire to a deep yellow. 

Then she made garments for herself and her husband. At first they 
were a simple skirt for her and sleeveless shirt and leggings for her husband 
and the decoration was dyed porcupine quills or a fringe of deerhoofs. Then 
with the coming of the Whites, there was more communication. She learned 
to put sleeves in the shirt and she could get beads for the decoration. At the 
present time, she makes gloves, which used to be unknown to Indians and dec¬ 
orates them with elaborate designs. She puts all the work she can on the 
baby's cradleboard, covering the rough slats with buckskin and embroidering 
it with colorful beads. 

No one knows when Paiute women began to weave bead belts but they 
make them now on a kind of loom of four or five taut strings stretched from 
the ends of a bent wooden bow. 

POTTERY: (IPottery was another of the extras which few Paiute enjoyed. 

The art is not much practiced by wandering peoples since pots 
are heavy and breakable but the Owens Valley people, to the south of the Ba¬ 
sin, nearer the great pottery making peoples of the Pueblos, had a few wom¬ 
en who knew how. They found clay which would do without any mixing with 
sand, ground it up and wet it. They started the pot by patting a little pancake 
with their hands, then rolled the clay into long sausages which they laid on in 
a spiral. Some Indians used implements for patting and shaping the pot, but 
the Paiute woman dipped her fingers in a syrup made of boiled mallow juice 
and smoothed with them. Then she dried the pot in the sun, painted it with 
syrup again and baked it. 





35 



She used only one fuel, the desert sage brush. She heaped this around 
the pots without the elaborate arrangements the Pueblo women make to pre¬ 
vent smoke staining, and then kept the fire going for half an hour or so, until 
the rough, gray vessels were hard enough for use. 

The pots were simple wide-mouthed jars for cooking. A woman who 
had none could do quite well with a basket but the thing her family needed 
much more was a pipe. The Paiute smoked clay pipes but not with a bowl like 
those of the Whites. The pipe was simply a tube made by baking clay around 
a stick, then pulling out the stick. If a man's wife could not make him one of 
these—and, since few women made pottery she seldom could—he got it by 
trade. 


36 


THE NORTHERN PAiUTE INDIANS 


LIFE IN THE BAND 

DID THEY HAVE ANY GOVERNMENT? (There was no Paiute nation. 

Paiute is a chance name given 
by the Whites to a number of Indians who live in the same part of the country 
and speak the same language. No cne knows how this came about and the 
Indians themselves, as we have mentioned, do not understand the name and 
never use it. The people who are called Paiute have no government in com¬ 
mon: they simply recognize each other as friends. They are divided into bands 
and the only name they have is the band name. This usually refers to the 
kind of food they eat most and, therefore, to the place where they live and 
where that food can be found. Thus, there are Seed Eaters, Berry Eaters, 
Fish Eaters, Cattail Eaters. We have been describing only two bands, but 
there are various others and probably all have some slight difference in their 
arrangements. We can give only a general picture into which new details may 
be fitted. 

Each band had a country which was their general roaming ground. 
They knew just where its limits were and, if they went outside them, they 
were either visiting in the country of other Paiute who were their friends, or 
they were on the land of Indians of another language who might kill them as 
trespassers. The land which they considered their own, they did not use all 
the time. Some of it was hunting land where they only went occasionally, 
some was good only in warm weather, some only in cold. 

They had a regular plan of wandering. There were generally two or 
three sheltered places in their country which were good for winter homes 
and at each of these, a number of families built permanent houses so that 
during cold weather, there was a little village there. In spring, the village 
broke up and every family went off looking for game and growing things. But 
often, certain families would go to the same place year after year and keep 
little shelters there. In that way, they could have company at their hunting 
and food gathering. The fall was the big meeting time. Then the hard sum¬ 
mer's work of getting in the food was over; the weather was not too cold for 
camping and there were herds of antelope that must be hunted by a number 
of men together. 

All the band of one hundred or more people then met together for 
a week or two. They charmed the antelope and drove them together to be 
killed as has been described, and perhaps they also had a rabbit hunt. Then 
they feasted on the meat and spent some time in dancing and playing games. 
This was the only time when they got together. 


37 



Plate 26. Women ploying shinny, 



















For such a busy, separated life, they did not need very much govern¬ 
ment. The band had a head man who acted more like a father and general 
adviser than a chief. He told his people where to hunt and chose the time for 
the big meeting. When visitors came, he entertained and fed them and if 
something went wrong, he talked to the offenders and tried to straighten it 
out. But he had no power to punish or to command. People did as he asked be¬ 
cause they respected him and if he could not persuade them, there was noth¬ 
ing to be done. When this man died , his son or younger brother generally took 
his place. The people decided which of the men in his family was best suited 
for the work and if there was no such man, they chose someone else. 

This left a great deal to be settled by the people themselves. Any¬ 
one who caught a neighbor stealing, would argue with him and get him to 
return the goods or something equal to them. The headman, if he was nearby, 
would use his influence. Otherwise the two settled it for themselves. But the 
thief often gave back the goods because he could not afford to have his 
neighbors hate him: he and his wife needed their help too often. When there 
was murder, the family of the murdered man did their own punishing. They 
waited a convenient time and then killed the murderer or one of his relatives. 

HOW DID THEY FIGHT? (It can be seen that there was no large scale 

warfare. If people happened to trespass on the 
territory of some hostile Indians, they might be killed and then their relatives 
would go out and try to get their killers. Or if hostile Indians came on the ter¬ 
ritory of the band, some of its members would get together and try to drive 
them off. This happened when the Whites first began to move into Paiute 
country and there was perhaps more fighting then than there had been for a 
long time. It was very informal. Any brave man acted as leader and his follow¬ 
ers threw up low rock walls as forts. They fought with bow and arrow and 
shield, usually naked, though in some part of the country they put together 
rods in a stiff, wide belt to protect the body as a sort of armor. They rarely 
took scalps or captives: they had no use for them. 

HOW DID THEY PLAY ? ( Probably their greatest opportunity for commu¬ 
nity life was in games. They could not play 
these constantly as the people can when they are gathered in large camps 
or villages. Most of the time the families were moving about in small groups 



Plate 27. Woman with tattooed face. 


39 


which could not muster enough men for a couple of ball teams or a guessing 
match. But in the autumn, when a number of families gathered for the ante¬ 
lope hunt or the pine nut gathering, they held a five or six day jollification 
and played games all day long. At Owens Valley, they built a big corral or 
fenced enclosure, some three or four hundred feet across. It had no roof but 
the walls were ten feet high and thatched like the walls of a house. This was 
the nearest the Paiute came to a public building. 

Inside, the old men made speeches and played guessing games. All of 
these involved betting and caused great excitement. In fact, they do still, for 
the autumn get-together is held to this day in some parts of the Basin. Most 
popular was the hand game which is a favorite of Indians almost everywhere 
in the country. It is played with sticks or bones, small enough to be hidden in 
the hand—some of one color and some of another. One side hides the sticks 
and one side guesses in which hands they are. The Paiute played with four 
sticks, two plain white and two white with black bands. One side took the 
sticks and two of its men hid them, while one on the other side was appointed 
to guess. The sides sat crosslegged, facing each other and while the guesser 
was thinking, the men on the opposite side chanted taunting songs to confuse 
him. At present, they accompany themselves by drumming on a plank. 



Plate 28. Left, counters for scoring in games. Right, stick dice. 


There were other gambling schemes. One was to hide sticks of dif¬ 
ferent length under a basket and guess their position. Another was to use the 
sticks as dice. Eight of them were painted in different ways and thrown out 
of the hand on the ground. Men played this and women had a special dice 
game with four sticks. Or, there was another with eight sticks which they 
threw out of a basket. Even beaver teeth were marked and used as dice. 

Outside the enclosure, the young men played football, though not the 
football of the Whites, for they used a small ball, the size of a man's fist, 
stuffed solidly with hair. Five to eight men played on a side and each side had 
a goal made of arch willow rods. The game was for each side to kick the ball 
through its own goal. It was a rough game, where the men dodged, fought 
and wrestled. There were no rules except that they must not touch the ball 
with their hands. 

The great kickball race, which is a specialty of Southwest Indians, 
was also a favorite of the Paiute. There were two balls, one to a side and 
each side had any number of men, from five to twenty. They ran straight 
ahead, kicking the balls in front of them. Any man who was nearest the 


40 


























ball, kicked it and, while he was getting his balance another ran up and 
kicked it further. The main thing was to keep it going and to get around 
the course of a mile and back, ahead of the other side. Besides these games, 
men threw long poles at a rolling hoop or shot arrows at a mark. Women 
had a shinny game played with sticks and a sort of double ball of two knots 
of buckskin tied together by buckskin braid. Sometimes they juggled pebbles 
in the air or played jacks with pebbles and a stone for a ball. 

DANCES: {[After a day of games, the evening entertainment was dancing. 

People gathered in the corral, with a leader to sing the dance 
songs. Sometimes a line of men went through the camp beforehand, to col¬ 
lect the crowd. They stamped along behind a leader, bows and arrows held 
ready for battle and shouting: “Shoot him! Shoot him!" They stopped in 
front of any likely dancer who was then supposed to fall into place at the end 
of the line. If he did not, they attacked him in fun. But of course everyone 
joined. There were a hundred or more people in line, when they marched into 
the corral, ready for the real dancing. The step for this was very simple and 
some people might not call it dancing at all for men and women simply took 
hands and moved sidewise in a circle. But they did not start immediately. This 
was a woman's dance and no man entered it until some woman had tapped 



Plate 29. Left, deer hoof rattle. Right, flute. 


41 



Plate 30. Paiute dance corral. 






























































































































































































him on the shoulder and invited him. Then he wo ..Id keep his place by her side 
all the evening. This was the chance of all the year, for flirtation and love- 
making. 


HOW DID THEY MAKE MUSIC? ( Some old men who sat in the center of 

the circle singing, furnished the music 
for this dance. The Paiute also had musical instruments, though none that 
would play a tune What they wanted principally was something to keep time 
for the dances. This is the case with most Indian music. With the Whites, the 
point of a song is the tune, while the time is very simple and often does not 
change from one end of the song to the other. With the Indians, it is the melo¬ 
dy which is simple, while the rhythm is changed and varied in a most interest¬ 
ing way. 


For keeping the rhythm, the Paiute made rattles and clappers out of 
everything available. They split a reed at one end so that it would clap when 
shaken. They tied deer hoofs around their knees so they would rattle in the 
dance. They made a rattle out a deer's ear with pebbles inside. Or they 
got rhythm by plucking a bow string with the fingers, like a banjo with only 
one note. The medicine man made a rattle out of a number of the hard, 
brittle deerhoofs tied together or he cut a little flute out of elderberry. The 
flute was the only instrument which could play a few notes and the young 
men made them also with which to serenade girls. 


DID THEY EVER TRAVEL? { Most of these things were made with materi¬ 
als they had at hand. There were some things, 
however, which were not common in their Basin and which they wanted very 
much. For these, they had to travel. One of their first needs was new kinds 
of food. They liked berries: elderberry, manzanita and sowberry and they liked 
acorns. They got these from their next door neighbors at the west, the Mono. 
Then they went a little further north to the Achomawi for bows and basketry 
caps better made than their own and to the Klamath to the north of them for 
clamshell beads. What they traded in return was seeds, rabbitskin blankets, 
buckskin, pine nuts and stone for arrows. 


For travelling in the snow, the men worked out a kind of snowshoe 
which was circular, with sticks laid across it instead of netting and they 
smeared charcoal under their eyes to prevent snow blindness. A man carried 
his baggage in a skin slung on his back or, if it was very heavy, by a rope 
over his head. His water was in the gum covered water jar, slung from his 
belt. 


43 


Women did not go on long trips in winter so they had no snowshoes. 
But in summer when the whole family was moving, the woman carried her 
household utensils in the burden basket, with the baby on top. No one 
travelled by water but sometimes the men needed a raft for shooting ducks. 
Then they tied together two enormous bundles of reeds, turned up and pointed 
at the ends like a gondola. Until this raft got soaked, they could keep afloat 
on it. 


WHAT DID THEY KNOW? fMost of their knowledge concerned practical 

things such as where to find plants and 
game, how to make implements. But they had names for many of the stars 
and arranged them in constellations different from those of the Whites, such 
as Dancing Girls and Men Racing Home. They watched the position of the 
stars and could tell time at night by them. 

They had names for the four directions and for some of the months 
in the year. They did not think of a month as having any special number of 
days but simply as the time from one new moon to the next. They named the 
winter moons, for these were the hard times when everyone was counting 
the days until spring. The summer moons, they did not name. Perhaps every¬ 
one was too busy then to keep count. They did not keep any count of years 
but remembered them by some important thing that had happened like a 
drought or a storm. Most people, the old ones say, did not count beyond ten 
though they have words for twice ten and three times ten, up to two hundred. 



Plate 31. Snowshoe. 


44 
















THE NORTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS 


LIFE IN THE FAMILY 


BIRTH: ([The Paiute felt that childbirth and the other functions of women 
so different from those of men, were filled with a magic power and 
often when a woman was about to give birth, they did not let any men come 
near her. They felt that she was, at this time, so full of woman's special power 
that if she touched a man, she would make him like a woman. That is, he 
could not hunt or fight: he would lose his strength. Surprise Valley people 
built a special house for such a woman to the north of the main house—north 
being the region of sickness and evil. 

There she was very kindly treated. There were generally several 
women to help her and they gave her the medical treatment which had been 
worked out for sick people in this cold country where there were so few blan¬ 
kets. They called it a hot bed. They made it by digging a shallow pit in the 
ground and warming it as they warmed their earth ovens—by building a fire 
in the bottom and letting it burn out. Then they covered the coals and ashes 
with clean sand or with juniper boughs and laid the woman on this soft, warm 
bed. 


Owens Valley people did not send the woman to a separate house, 
but they made her the hot bed. Sometimes they gave her a steam bath. She 
did not go to the sweathouse, for that was men's property. Instead, her helpers 
took a large basket which was made watertight by a coating of pitch on the 
outside. They filled it with water, then heated rocks in the fire and placed 
them in it, just as they did for boiling gruel. Steam rose from the water and 
the woman sat over it. 

After the baby had come, the mother and father both had to keep 
several rules. The idea was that they had come close to a powerful magic 
and, if they did not do something to tame it, the baby would die. So they 
fasted in the way that most Southwest Indians did, by not eating meat and 
grease, though they might have their usual seed gruel. Also, they did not 
touch their hair with their hands. That was another ancient rule connected 
with the belief that the hair was a symbol of the whole person. People in the 
magic state following birth must not touch it for fear it would fall out, so they 
always used a stick. 


45 


These rules they kept for the first five days and sometimes for a 
month. During all that time, the man did no hunting for even if he had not 
touched his wife, he had come too near to the magic power of woman to have 
any success in male pursuits. But he tried to gain some benefit from the 
magic. While he was under its influence, he practiced running for the first 
five days: to the east in the morning, to the west in the evening. He felt that if 
he ran at such a time he would always do it well and so have hunting luck. 

EDUCATION: ( The baby was given a diaper of fine sage brush bark and 

wrapped in a rabbitskin blanket. Its grandmother made 
it a basketry cradle and then several more as it outgrew the old ones. It lived 
on its mother's milk until long after it walked for there was no other good in¬ 
fant food available. 

Some time after it had begun to walk, it would get a name. Generally, 
this came from the mother's parents, the grandfather naming a boy, the 
grandmother a girl. Perhaps the name was the grandparent's own and per¬ 
haps it was a nickname, describing how the child walked or talked. But in 
any case, it was a magic property. The Paiute were like many Indians, who 
felt that a name was a part of the person himself and must not be used too 
freely. When they talked to anyone, they said: "My child, my brother, or 
father of So-and-So." Some of them would use a person's name behind his 
back but they thought it impolite to do so to his face. They changed names, 
also. When a child's father or mother died, the child's own name was not 
used for a while, even in talking about him. Later, he was given a new name, 
which had never been used in connection with his dead parent. Or perhaps, 
when the death was no longer fresh in people's minds, his old name might be 
given back to him. 

The child's education was the very practical manual training that 
came from sharing the work of the grown people. Girls went to get seeds with 
their mothers, boys followed their fathers out hunting. The older people gave 
them small tasks to do which were really useful and kept increasing the tasks 
as they grew older. 

It was the grandfather who gave them their lessons about right and 
wrong. He talked to the whole family when they were gathered in the winter 
house in the cold evenings and early mornings. He urged the boys to be out 
early and practice running and girls to grind flour and gather seeds. He told 
them not to steal and not to quarrel, and above all things, never to be lazy. 
A Paiute who was lazy was a drag on the whole family. One worker lost might 
mean to them just the difference between sufficiency and starvation. 

Sometimes by the age of eight or nine, a child would begin to have 
dreams that decided his future. The Paiute believed there were magic powers 
in the mountains, the animals, the gray fog of winter and the blue haze of 
summer. It was from these that man got help in his hard, dangerous life. He 


46 


did not pray to them. He went about his work as well as he could. Sometime 
when he was asleep, perhaps in a special lucky place, cne of these magic 
beings would come to him in a dream and show him how to do the things 
that the being itself could do. The hawk would show him how to run fast, 
the lizard how to hide in the rocks, the gray fog and the blue haze would come 
at his call and hide him from his enemies. 

It was not every man who had these powers. Some Indians make a 
great point of them but the Paiute were too busy to think much about mys¬ 
teries. They felt that the men who were going to be great and clever would 
dream, especially those who were to be medicine men. The others went about 
their duties contentedly, without expecting any special powers, much as the 
majority of people in modern times keep at work without expecting to become 
rich. 


COMING OF AGE: (When the boy was about fourteen, he was thought 
to be almost ready to take on a man's duties. At this 
time, he felt much as a woman did when having a baby: he was under magic 
influence and he must be careful that it brought good luck and not bad. So 
he often ate no meat. He got up early and ran as far as he could, sometimes 
up hill to get greater strength for the future. Sometimes his grandfather sang 
him special songs. Then he took a cold bath, another powerful way to keep 
from magic harm, and perhaps he asked the powers to help him. 

By this time, he was expected to be able to hunt alone but the first 
game he killed he must never eat himself. To do so would bring him bad luck, 
the people said, but the idea behind it was perhaps to teach him that his duty 
as a food getter was to think of others, not himself. Sometimes his grand¬ 
father performed a magic over the meat to give him better luck. Then he was 
allowed to smoke and was considered a full grown hunter. 

The magic surrounding girls when they changed from girlhood to 
womanhood was thought to be even more powerful than that for boys. It 
was no wonder that to early people, childbearing seemed the most mysterious 
thing in their world. They did not think of it as natural to the woman. They 
thought, rather, that some strange power descended on her now and then 
and that this power must be dangerous, both to her and to those around her. 
The first descent of this power, when she was fourteen or so was a particularly 
important time. No one knew what harm might come of it and so they made 
the girl stay away from other people, particularly men. In fact, she was just as 
dangerous as a pregnant woman and was treated in much the same way. 
She must eat only certain foods, generally not meat, grease or salt. She must 
not touch her head for the head was the most important part of her body and 
very full of magic. If she wanted to scratch it, she must use a stick. She 
must take a cold bath now and then to purify herself. 


47 


It sounds as if the girl was being punished but this was really not the 
case. Everything that she did was planned for the safety of herself and 
others. Some of the things were intended to make her a good and healthy 
woman in the future. The Paiute thought, as many Indians did, that anything 
which the girl did at this time would become a habit for the rest of her life. 
So they told her to run, so that she could go far and fast in her food gathering. 
They had her carry loads of wood and water because that was an important 
part of woman's work. 

We can find these same ideas through a great part of the southwest 
and California though each group of Indians has a slightly different way of 
carrying them out. Our two groups of Paiute were different, also. Surprise 
Valley people sent their girls away to a separate house, just as they sent 
women in childbirth. They made them stay a month, working hard and taking 
a cold bath every five days, to wash off the evil. Girls tried to keep their 
bodies healthy for the future, by twisting rings of sagebark to wear around 
arms and legs and waist. This was thought to keep off rheumatism. When the 
month was over, a girl gave away her clothes, or threw them away. She 
appeared in a new dress, bathed, with painted face and she was ready to 
marry. 

Owens Valley people did not have a separate house. Their way of 
caring for the girls was to keep them at home, but away from people. They 
gave them a "hot bed" and a steam bath to make them strong but they had 
them run and work and diet just like the girls at the north. 

The magic which had come to a girl lasted during all the time she was 
able to bear children and, once a month, she had to be careful. If she was 
a northern girl, she went to the separate house. If she was a southern girl, 
she stayed at home. In any case, she kept away from men and their belong¬ 
ings, she used her scratching stick and she did not eat meat, grease or salt. 


MARRIAGE: {[The picking of wives and husbands for the young people was 
generally done by their parents. In Paiute life, a young couple 
did not set up for themselves. It would not have been economical to have two 
people hunting and picking seeds all alone, so they joined forces with the 
old people, generally the wife's family. Therefore, it was very important to 
the elders that the new mate should be the right person. Sometimes they 
spoke to another family while the children were babies or even before they 
were born. "You are hardworking people and we should like to have one of 
your children in our family." These future connections must not be relatives 
of any sort for all marriage between relatives was forbidden. If there was 
already a son-in-law, married to one of the older sisters, the family did not 
seek any further. They let him have the younger sister too. 

This custom of marrying two sisters to the same man is a very ancient 
one and follows easily from the fact that the two sets of parents want as 
many bonds between them as possible. If the girl's parents like the boy's 


48 


family, they would rather give them two daughters than one. No old maids 
were possible in that sort of life for a woman had to have somebody to hunt 
for her. So most good hunters had several wives, usually sisters but sometimes 
not. Once in a while, two brothers married one wife between them. 

When a girl was fifteen and a boy seventeen or so, it was time for 
the marriage to take place. The parents gave each other a few gifts. In Owens 
Valley the boy's people gave most. Then, one night, the boy came to the 
house of the girl's family and stayed there. That was the marriage. 

The boy stayed with his new in-laws for a year or until he had a 
family of his own large enough to warrant a separate establishment. While 
he was with his wife's people, he hunted for them and tried to make as good 
a showing as possible. 


HOW TO GET ON WITH RELATIVES-IN-LAW: ( In a few parts of Paiute 

country, Owens Valley, 

for instance, a man thought it wrong to speak to his mother-in-law or even to 
her sisters. He acted as though the older women were not present and, if he 
needed to tell them something, he sent a message through his wife. Sometimes 
a woman had to do the same thing with her father-in-law, although this rule 
was not so strict. The idea was that the young people were showing respect to 
their "in-laws" and certainly it was a good way to prevent family quarrels. 
Many Indian tribes throughout the country practiced the custom, though not 
by any means all of them. Sometimes, as in Owens Valley, it was carried so far 
that a young man showed respect to his wife's brothers by never talking with 
them about improper subjects. As a compensation, he could joke and make 
very free with her sisters. After all, they might be his wives some day. 

The Paiute allowed divorces as most Indians did. Either a wife or a 
husband could leave when living together became impossible and the children 
remained with the one who stayed behind. 


DEATH: fWhen a member of the family died, the Paiute went into real 

mourning. They cut their long hair: sometimes men and wom¬ 
en both, sometimes only women, and all gathered to weep. They believed that 
the dead, both good and bad, went to a pleasant place but that, nevertheless, 
they preferred to be alive and were always trying to come back and to take 
the living away with them. Therefore, while they wept they often spoke to 
the dead: 

"We loved you, but your place is no longer here. Go now." They 
were afraid to touch the body, since death seemed to them to have some of 
the same magic as birth did. They wrapped it in a skin and hired people to 
carry it away and bury it. Digging was difficult in the hard earth, with no 


49 


implement but a pointed stick, so the funeral party generally found a cranny 
in the rocks, laid the body in and covered it with stones. Relatives burned all 
the dead man's property, for they felt that was the best way of sending it to 
him in the other world. If he had horses or dogs, they killed them, or at least 
killed the best ones. They wanted the dead man to be comfortable but they 
did not want his ghost to come back looking for his property. So they even 
burned the house or at least they moved it away where the ghost would not 
find it. They never spoke the name of the dead person, lest he might think 
they were calling him. We have mentioned that older people were sometimes 
called father or mother of So-in-So, in order that their own names need not 
be used. If such an older person died, then So-and-So, the name of the child, 
had to be dropped also. Using it might seem a roundabout way of calling the 
ghost. 


Widows and widowers had to forget their grief and marry again. 
Sometimes they did this in a very short time, because the family needed work¬ 
ers. A man who had lost his wife would expect to have one of her sisters 
to take her place and a woman would be taken care of by one of her dead 
husband's brothers. 

These death customs were more or less the same throughout the Basin 
but there were slight differences, even in the two valleys we have been de¬ 
scribing. In Owens Valley the mourners danced around a fire and hired 
special singers to accompany them. They even held a second mourning cere¬ 
mony, later on, as some of the California Indians do, and burned more prop¬ 
erty to show that they remembered the dead. For all the months between, 
they did not bathe or eat meat and fat. Finally their relatives paid people to 
bathe them and take away the death magic. 


50 


THE NORTHERN PAIUTE INDIANS 


LIFE AND THE GODS 


VISIONS: ( The Paiute god was all nature: mountains, animals, wind, fog: 

everything the people saw around them. They knew that 
these things had strange abilities they had not. The animals could run faster 
than they and get food better: the mountains could stand firm in storms with¬ 
out shelter: the fog could appear and disappear. So they thought of these 
things as powers. 

Two powers their tales tell, had created the earth. These were the 
animals who seemed to them the cleverest: Wolf and Coyote. They were 
men at that time, yet they had animal powers and took animal form when 
they wished. Wolf was the good power who was always trying to benefit 
mankind. Coyote was the bad, mischievous one, who was always trying to 
upset Wolf's plans. But they were not mighty beings like God and the Devil. 
When the earth was made, they took their places among the other animals. 

All men hoped for favor from these creatures and other things which 
represented the unknown force about them. A man, if he was going to be 
successful, had a dream when he was very young in which some power ap¬ 
peared and promised always to help him. After that, he could call on it 
whenever he was in need. Some of the tales tell about the power working 
real magic such as helping the man to disappear or turn into a bear. But at 
other times, it merely told him: you will succeed or you will get well. It was 
a way for him to bolster up his courage and it worked. 

The Paiute did not feel that any power was all bad nor all good: not 
even Wolf and Coyote. A power was simply an added force which helped 
a man to succeed in his actions. If he were a good man, they would be good 
actions; if he were bad, they would be evil. That was the case with medicine 


51 


men: the good ones used their power to cure—the bad ones, to kill though 
it might be the same power. So some medicine men were regarded as witches 
and might be killed by the angry people. 


MEDICINE MEN: fA medicine man, or sometimes a woman, got his powers 
just like the other dreamers though he usually began 
earlier and dreamed more. Sometimes he tested out his dreams. If he dreamed 
of a bear he would go to find a real bear and see if it seemed his friend or if 
it chased him. If it chased him, he did not trust the dream and tried again. 
Sometimes a man who dreamed did not want to be a medicine man. Then he 
told his dreams instead of keeping them secret. In one place, Owens Valley, 
he went through a ceremony of burning the feathers and other things that 
a medicine man generally used. He was afraid the power he had refused 
might do him harm. 

But if he wanted the power, he kept his dreams to himself at first. 
When he was thirty or forty he was old enough for the people to listen to him 
for they regarded young men as children. Then, sometimes, he gave a public 
performance and sang the songs his power had taught him. People knew from 
this he was a doctor and called for his help. 

If his power was for curing, it was generally only for one ailment: 
snake bites, burns or some serious illness. The people knew his specialty and 
called him only for that. He built a fire, sometimes two, and then walked or 
danced up and down, singing his songs. This was to call his power. Then he 
might move his hands over the patient, blow tobacco smoke from his clay 
pipe, wave eagle feathers, or pretend to suck the evil out of the body. 

There were certain doctors who could call back the soul. This hap¬ 
pened when the patient was unconscious and his soul was thought to have 
gone for a time to the land of the dead. The doctor lay down beside him and 
sent his own soul after that of the patient. If his power was strong enough, 
he could bring it home. 

The doctor was paid quite highly with a buckskin or a basket and his 
meals. If he did not work a cure, he often gave back some of the pay. If he 
failed to cure several times in succession, he was in real danger for the 
people might decide he was using his power for evil instead of for good and 
that they ought to kill him. 


52 


A few medicine men had powers that helped them not to cure but 
to charm the antelope, to prophesy the weather or even to turn into bears. 
Antelope charming was especially important. We have mentioned the 
ceremony in which the medicine man made an imitation antelope from a 
bundle of skins and then performed a sort of music by rubbing a stick across 
the string that tied it. Sometimes on the night when he did this, he had a 
dream which told him from what direction the antelope would come. The 
man who performed this ceremony was the most important man in the band 
since antelope was the most important food supply. The weather medicine 
men are only a legend now: there have been none for some time. But there 
are stories about the bear medicine men; how they could walk up to bears 
without being hurt or turn themselves into bears and pursue their enemies. 


CEREMONIES: ( The Paiute life was so scattered and busy that people could 
not come together often for ceremonies. The only real cere¬ 
mony was the singing and dancing which brought the antelope to them. But 
after the rabbit hunt, they sometimes gathered in the sweat house and sang 
songs to the accompaniment of a special deer's ear rattle. 

It was a hard working life, where each person had to rely mostly on 
himself for getting food and keeping out of trouble. Even for getting in touch 
with the powers outside himself, there was no religious organization to help 
him. His dreams came to him alone and, if he obtained power, he used it 
cs he thought best. It is the kind of life to make strong, self-reliant individuals 
and such is the heritage the Paiute bring to modern life. 


TOBACCO: { The Paiute used tobacco like all Indians. Theirs was a wild 
plant but they gave it a sort of care which was more than they 
gave to anything else. They sometimes burned over the ground where it usual¬ 
ly came up and they turned water in if it was getting too dry. If the leaves 
were too small, they pruned the plants to make them grow better. 

Late in summer, they gathered the leaves, dried them, ground them, 
moistened them and made them into balls. It was mostly older men who 
smoked tobacco and they used it sparingly, mostly to pass around on social 
occasions when each took a few puffs from the same pipe. Medicine men used 
it as a sort of incense in curing. 


The datura, or Jimsonweed, grew near Paiute country and old men in 
Owens Valley cut up and boiled the root. They would give it to someone who 
wanted to see visions and then watch him so that he came to no harm. Jim¬ 
sonweed was said to help the drinker find lost objects and sometimes people 
took it for that but they felt it dangerous and did not use it much. 


i < 


53 


Besides these two, there were many herbs used as medicine, not by the 
medicine man but by any ordinary person who had learned their uses. Tea was 
made from the leaves of several plants and the roots of others were cut up and 
boiled, either for healing drinks or for poultices. 


Plate 32. Man wearing rabbitskin blanket. 



54 















THE NORTHERN PAEUTE INDIANS 


HISTORY 


ESCAPE EARLY EXPLORERS: ( Paiute life went on as we have described it 

until about a hundred years ago. At that 
time, the United States did not stretch from ocean to ocean, as it does now. 
The states were all east of the Mississippi and many people thought they 
would never extend further. West of the Mississippi was wild land, stretching 
to the Rockies. Beyond the Rockies was Mexico. No one knew just how far 
north Mexico extended but it took most of California and Nevada, along 
with Arizona and New Mexico. This would have included the Basin country 
if anything had been known about it, but few Whites did know anything. 
Hidden between its mountain ranges, this barren area had escaped the ex¬ 
plorers. We know now that there is gold and silver in its mountains but these 
had not yet been found. On first view, the land looked unfit for human settle¬ 
ment. The only White people who had been there were the trappers. The 
early years of the nineteenth century were the time when the fashionable peo¬ 
ple of Europe were wearing beaver furs and especially beaver hats. Beaver 
trappers were exploring every stream on the American continent and moving 
further and further west as the eastern streams were exhausted. By 1825 
they had come to the Basin and in the next years we hear tales of adventurous 
trips by famous men like Jedediah Smith, Peter Skene Ogden, Milton Sublette 
and Captain Bonneville. These travellers met the Paiute and had friendly re¬ 
lations with them but their passing did not make much difference. It was not 
until 1840 that change began. 

By this time people from the eastern states were beginning to travel 
across the country to California. It never occurred to them to stop and settle 
on the way. They hurried through the wild prairies and mountains to the west¬ 
ern coast and some passed through the Basin. Old Paiute accounts tell how the 
covered wagons would stop beside some stream, how the Indians would come 
to look and the immigrants would give them bags of flour. They had no idea 
what the white powder was, so they threw it away but they kept the bags to 
make clothing. To people who had made skirts out of sage bark and water 
scum, a flour bag was real wealth. 


55 


UNITED STATES ACQUIRES AREA: { Suddenly the great, vague country 

of California ceased to belong to 
Mexico. In 1848 a treaty was signed turning it over to the United States. In 
1849, gold was discovered there. Then the immigrant wagons came thick and 
fast. Some of the travellers saw that the Basin country had a few good streams 
and green meadows. They decided to settle there. Ranches sprang up wherever 
there were good streams and Owens Valley was one of the first places where 
this occurred. Surprise Valley, with less water, was not so desirable but the 
people there began to learn White ways, as all the other Paiute did. They felt 
friendly toward the newcomers and often they worked on the ranches and were 
paid for their work with knives, guns, White men's clothes and new kinds of 
food. 


Then silver was discovered in Nevada. Virginia City, where the big 
strike was made in 1857 is in the western part of the state north of Owens 
Lake where one of our Paiute groups lived. Miners came swarming there and 
soon the western Basin was dotted with camps. The country was growing so 
full that the old, wandering life of the Paiute was interfered with. Cattle be¬ 
gan to eat the seed plants that were used for food. Ranchers cut down the 
pinon trees for fuel. 

The United States cannot be proud of this period in its history though, 
as a government, it had no responsibility. Nevada had been turned over to the 
Union with California but it was not yet a state or even a territory. It was sep¬ 
arated from the government at Washington by miles of wilderness and the 
nearest authorities of any sort were in California. The miners and ranchers, 
rough men who had endured hardships, felt themselves in a No Man's Land 
where they could do as they pleased. Sometimes they pleased to do things 
which caused injury to the Indians. The Indians fought. They were a peaceful 
people, not organized for war. They had not even a head chief who could get 
several bands together. Still, when they fought the Whites at Pyramid Lake, in 
western Nevada in 1860, they were successful. Even though they had only 
bows and arrows, while the Whites had guns, they drove off a party of 400, so 
the accounts say, and killed several. They fought near Owens Lake too, get¬ 
ting together and building a fort, though they had never done such a thing 
before. However, the Whites had more men and they could always get help 
from the soldiers in California. In the end the Paiutes saw there was no use 
fighting them. 

Now the United States government realized that the new western 
country must be organized. In 1859, a railroad went through to the coast. Ne¬ 
vada was made a territory in 1 861. Ini 864 it became a state. These years 
were the great time of change for the Paiute. Some of them moved their 
camping places to keep out of the way of the White men. Some settled 
down near them to work on the ranches. Some fought. In 1874, the govern¬ 
ment set up the first reservations for the Paiute at Pyramid Lake and Walker 
Lake in western Nevada. Others for Shoshoni and mixed groups of Paiute 


56 


and other neighboring tribes were established about the same time. The Pai- 
ute were not used to settling down and many did not wish to do so. Instead, 
they built camps near the White ranches and worked there in spring and sum¬ 
mer, instead of gathering roots and seeds. In fall and winter, they gathered 
pine nuts and went hunting, just as they used to do. White men who visited 
them at this time were surprised that they had not cared to change their 
houses or their food. They were still living in the sort of house described 
earlier and eating rabbits and pine nuts. They took from the White men only 
a few things and, for the rest, they went on with their old life. 

THE GHOST DANCE: fBy 1888 an interesting development took place 

among them, which became famous throughout 
Indian country. Everyone who has read any Indian history has heard of the 
Ghost Dance, yet few remember that it started among the Northern Paiute. In 
fact, it began some forty miles northwest of Walker Lake, which you will see 
on the map in the northeast part of Nevada. There lived a young man known 
as Wowoka, which means "the cutter." He supported himself, as other Paiute 
did, by working on a White ranch, while he camped with his family in a brush- 
covered Indian house near by. In 1888 there was an eclipse of the sun, at a 
time when Wowoka was ill with fever. "He went out of his head" as the 
Whites would put it or, as the Indian say, he "died for a time." In that state, 
he had a dream or a vision about the life of the Indians in this changing time. 
This is how he told about it: 

"When the sun died, I went up to Heaven and saw God and all the 
people who died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my peo¬ 
ple they must be good and love one another and not fight or steal or lie." 

That was how a peaceful man thought of solving his peoples' difficul¬ 
ties. He wanted them to be at peace with everyone, even the Whites. In his 
vision, God gave him a special dance, to make his people happy. It was the 
regular round dance, which we have described, where men and women step 
sidewise in a circle, hand in hand. 

Wowoka said they must dance it for five nights in succession, singing 
the songs he had dreamed. They were sung to the usual slow music of the 
Basin and their words were poetic, though brief. 

The wind stirs the willows, 

The wind stirs the grasses. 

The whirlwind, the whirlwind 
The snowy earth comes gliding, 

The snowy earth comes gliding. 

The rocks are ringing 

They are ringing in the mountains. 


• ‘ 


57 


Wowoka taught that if people went through this dance at intervals, 
decorating themselves with a sacred paint he had and if they lived rightly for 
the rest of the time, everyone on earth would be happy. The Indians would 
live as they used to do, the White people would disappear, all dead Indians 
would return and there would be no more death nor disease. He did not tell 
his people to fight. He preached only that they should be good and hold the 
dance, which was really a religious ceremony. His doctrine spread, for there 
were many Indian tribes who wanted the old days to return. Some of these 
were fighters, like the Arapaho and the Sioux. The Sioux, particularly, took 
up the dance with excitement and added more to it than Wowoka had 
preached. In the end, their dancing brought about a battle with the Whites 
and the Ghost Dance became known all over the country as a warlike cere¬ 
mony. It was never that in the Basin. There it continued for a few years and 
finally it was dropped, though there are old people who can still sing the 
songs. The Paiute turned to more practical ways of getting on under the new 
conditions. 

NEW INDIAN SCHOOLS: {[They began to send their children to school. 

There was not much schooling for anyone in 
Nevada in those days, but the state had established little "ranch" schools 
near the big sheep ranches where both Indian and White children could learn 
their three R's. In 1892 the government set up an Indian school at Carson 
City, where Paiute children could go if they were really anxious for an educa¬ 
tion. Some of them, too, went south to the big Indian Bureau boarding schools 
at Phoenix, Arizona, or Riverside, California. Some went even to Carlisle in 
Pennsylvania. It was when these travellers came home that the real changes 
in Paiute life began. The young people knew about using wooden houses, 
chairs, tables and canned goods and the old people who had been sitting on 
the floor in their brush huts, began to change. 

How were they to get the new comforts? They were hard workers and 
these pages have shown that they got everything possible out of their barren 
country, considering the tools they had. But the tools were not iron so they 
could not dig the gold and silver from the hills. Nor could they easily make 
irrigation canals so that crops could be grown during the dry summer. They 
had no sheep and cows so they could not use the desert plain for pasture. The 
White people had all these things and the country was now producing metals, 
alfalfa and sheep, rather than pine nuts, seeds and rabbits. 

Most Paiute people had not the capital to become miners and ranch¬ 
ers. They worked for the Whites, especially as sheep shearers and they were 
known to be industrious and honest. But they were homeless. Many of the 
ranch hands were camping on ranch land. Most others were living on land 
which was still unclaimed and which was known as public domain. A few were 
living around Fort Bidwell in California (these were some of our Surprise Val¬ 
ley Paiute) and Fort McDermitt in Nevada, working for the military and re¬ 
ceiving rations. None were doing any farming for themselves except those on 
the small government reservations, for here the United States had set up irri¬ 
gation projects. 


58 


On page 63 is a list of these reservations and the dates when they were 
established. The government did not make the distinction which we have 
made between Paiute and Shoshoni. In fact, the people themselves did not 
make it, for the distinction was only of language. The two groups, when they 
lived in the same part of the country, had much the same customs. Therefore, 
on many reservations, the Paiute and Shoshoni were mixed, and sometimes 
there were Washo from just across the Sierras. The mixture is indicated on our 
list. There were also reservations belonging to Shoshoni alone which are not 
mentioned. 

By 1934 there were five pieces of land set aside for the Paiute. The 
people living on them looked outwardly very much like White people. Most of 
them spoke English. They lived in wooden houses, though very simple ones. 
They wore White man's clothes, except on special occasions. They worked at 
White men's jobs though they still went out for pine nuts when the crop was 
good. Many went to church but they also held round dances at least once a 
year. They were poor. They had given up their old life and learned the White 
ways but they could not go much farther without more land and more money. 

INDIAN REORGANIZATION ACT: ( It was at this time (June 1934) that 

the Indian Reorganization Act was 
passed. This law, meant to give Indians more chance to govern themselves, 
was almost a charter of rights for many an Indian tribe, the Paiute among 
them. Its provisions are fully described in one of the pamphlets of this Branch 
but we will summarize here the three important things it accomplished. 

The first was to help the Indians keep their land. It seems strange that 
Indians themselves had been selling land but they were forced by necessity. 
The government, up to now, had been dividing Indian reservations up into 
farms. These were given to individual Indians who, after some long formal¬ 
ities, could do with tnem as they liked. Any land left over after the farms were 
marked off, was thrown open to Whites. This was the allotment system. It was 
planned so that the Indian might have full responsibility for his land, like a 
White man, and it was thought to be the best way to interest him in learning 
White ways. It did not work in that way, however. Many Indians knew nothing 
about farming and they had no equipment, but they needed money. They sold 
their land, not realizing how hard it would be to get more, and then they had 
no way to make a living. 

The Reorganization Act ruled that there should be no more allot¬ 
ments. Nothing could be done, of course, about the tribes where these had 
already been made but, where they had not, the land was to belong hence¬ 
forth to the whole tribe. The tribe could allow its members to use the land, 
in the old Indian way, but it could not sell the land to them or to anyone else. 
Neither could the government sell or give it away. Indian land was to be kept 
for Indians. 

The new rule about old land was not so important to the Paiute, who 
had not had very much. But a provision of the Act which meant much to them 
was that Congress might appropriate money to buy new land for Indian tribes 


• 1 


59 


which needed it. The Paiute were certainly among these. Since 1934, over 
7,000 acres have been bought for them, some for farming, some for grazing 
and some small tracts where they can at least have permanent homes. 

The second important provision of the Act was for Indian self govern¬ 
ment. If a tribe was to own land, it must be legally able to manage it and, un¬ 
der American law, no group of people can do that without being incorporated. 
Villages, clubs, businesses, all incorporate under the White man's system and 
any Indian tribe that wished was given the right to do the same. It must write 
a constitution, have it approved by the government, and elect officers. The 
officers would be somewhat different from the chiefs of old times, when no 
records were kept and no money handled, but the real fact of tribal discussion 
of affairs and tribal responsibility would be the same. The charter might pro¬ 
vide, if the Indians wished, that the tribe should keep order on the reservation. 
The United States government must attend to the major crimes in order that 
justice might be the same everywhere, but the smaller offenses might be han¬ 
dled by Indian officials, in the old tribal way. 

The Paiute took up this provision enthusiastically and five of their res¬ 
ervations incorporated. Their discussions go on in the old Indian manner, with 
long deliberation and with argument before action instead of after. They have 
profited, as they needed to by the third provision of the Act, which allowed 
Indians to borrow money from the government. 

Indians came into the White man's world without capital. Their old 
system was one of exchange and gifts. They had no money and almost no way 
to make it. When a farmer wanted to improve his land or a young man wished 
to get a professional education, they were helpless. No one would lend an In¬ 
dian money, because he had no security to give. The Reorganization Act set 
aside a fund of several million dollars to be loaned to Indian corporations. The 
corporation could use the money itself or re-lend to individuals or groups who 
needed it. These borrowers would repay the corporation and the corporation 
would return the money to the government. As fast as they paid back, the 
money could be loaned again. It was a revolving fund, at the constant service 
of those who could make good use of it. 

One group of Paiute has already made such use. These are the people 
at Fort McDermitt, who have some Shoshoni with them. The fort was an old 
military post, where Indians of various groups gathered in former days to have 
protection. When the soldiers moved out, the Indians received allotments on 
the military reserve. There was no more than space to live on, at first, though 
later some tribal grazing land was added. But raising cattle was hard, for 
there was no forage in winter. The Indian cattlemen might have given up, 
discouraged, but they had incorporated under the Reorganization Act. First 
the government bought them a large hay ranch, under the provisions of the 
Act. Then they received a loan of $3500 to buy machinery. Now they are 
raising enough hay to feed all their cattle for the winter; they are selling 
enough to pay ranch expenses and in four years have paid back $1000 to the 
government. 


60 


The Act provided for another sort of loan, this time to young peopit 
who wanted schooling. The Indian Bureau already had high schools and voca¬ 
tional schools but students who wanted college or other special training, had 
to go to school with the Whites. A good experience if you have the money! 
White students themselves have no easy time to finance a professional educa¬ 
tion but they have opportunities like part-time jobs, scholarships and they or 
their parents can borrow. The Indian has less chance at these, especially the 
borrowing. Therefore, the Congress gave the Indian Bureau a yearly sum, 


!-! 



for the Washoe, Shoshone and Paiute Indians.. 


• < 


61 











Plate 34. A Paiute Indian woman of Moapa Reservation who still earns part of her living 
making the baskets traditional with her tribe. In the picture are the conical burden basket, the 
pitch-covered water bottle, and the winnower on which she is working. These baskets are of 

willow, with coarse weave, and no design. 



















which amounts usually to about a hundred thousand dollars, for loans to 
young Indians who can make good use of a special education. Eighteen Paiute 
have borrowed in this way and that is an unusually large number, considering 
the size of the tribe. They are pursuing advanced study in carpentry, dairying, 
agriculture, physical education, home economics, business, elementary teach¬ 
ing and engineering. 

The situation to which these young people will come home is not that 
which met the first students who found their families camping here and there, 
with no future beyond that of ranch hands, for Nevada is not dotted with 
tracts of land, large and small, which belong to the government but have been 
set aside for the use of Indians. Some of these are reservations, which allow 
space for farming, some are what is called colonies, which at least provide 
land for homes. Living on them are 1 150 Paiute, 940 Shoshoni and 540 Wa- 
sho, (a tribe of different language which has seeped in from across the Sier¬ 
ras). 


CARSON INDIAN AGENCY: ( In chcrge of all this land and the interests 

of its people, is the Carson Indian agency, 
in western Nevada. Its jurisdiction covers almost the entire state, with the ad¬ 
dition of Mono and Inyo counties in California, which are old Paiute country. 

The government is attending to the education of these people in five 
reservation days schools, the boarding school near Carson City and other 
boarding schools outside the state. Seven hundred of them go to White public 


A large number of small areas have been purchased recently, where small bands are being re-settled. How¬ 
ever most of the more important reservations or colonies are included in this table. 


Reservation 
or *Colony 

Date 

Established 

Acreage 

Kind of land 

Allotted 
or not 

Popu¬ 

lation 

Organ¬ 

ized 

Pyramid Lake 

1874 

475,162 

Grazing & irrigated 

Never allotted 

558 

O 

Walker River 

1874 


Irrigated 

Allotted 

461 

O 


1936 

323,848 

Grazing 




Fallon Res. 

1902 

6,640 

3028 irrigated 

Allotted 

292 


McDermitt 

1912 

31.867 

Homesites 

Public domain 

280 

O 


1936 


Grazing land 

allotments 






Meadow land 




Summit Lake 

1913 

8,025 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

46 

V 




Summer grazing 




’Carson City 

1892 

160 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

63 


Lovelock 

1910 

18 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

121 

V 

’Reno-Sparks 

1917 

28 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

191 

O 

’Winnemucca 

1917 

340 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

38 

O 

’Yerington Res. 

1917 

1,076 

Homesites 

Not allotted 

155 

O 

and Colony 







Bishop 

1912, 1913 

988 

Homesites, grazing 

Not allotted 




1915, 1939 






Independence 

1915 1916 

360 


Allotted 1910 

930 


Big Pine 

1939 

279 

Grazing 

Tribal 



Indian Ranch 

1939 

560 

Grazing 

Tribal 


V 

Lone Pine 

1939 

237 


Tribal 



* Dresslerville 

1917 

40 

Grazing 

Tribal 

162 

0 

Duck Valley 

1877 

289,827 

Grazing 

Tribal 

564 


Te-Moak (Bat- 


10.559 

Grazing 

Tribal 

280 


tie Mt., Ely, 






O 

Elko) 







Yomba (Reese 

1938 

3,721 

No data yet 

Tribal 

96 

V 

River) 







Moapa River 

1874 

1,128 

Grazing 

508 Tribal 

156 

V 





620 Trust allot. 



’Las Vegas 


10 

Campsite 


35 

O 

Colony 






O 


Groups in the last column, if marked O, are organized under the Indian Reorganization Act, if marked V, 
have voted to accept the Act. 


63 
















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schools. The jurisdiction employs doctors and field nurses and has two hospi¬ 
tals besides the school hospital near Carson City. It is also employing agricul¬ 
turists and grazing experts to instruct the Indian farmers and it is organizing 
4-H clubs among the farmers' children. Most of all, it is buying more land 
whenever the money is available, buying cattle for the Indians and buying 
water rights. 

What has happened to the groups who have had so large a place in 
this narrative, the Owens and Surprise Valley Paiute? The Owens Valley peo¬ 
ple live in Inyo County California and are under the Carson jurisdiction. 
There are 800 of them now and they have several reservations, two of which, 
Fort Independence and Bishop, are listed on page 63. The other tracts are too 
small and barren for farming and the Indians had been supporting themselves 
by wage work until a few years ago. Then the city of Los Angeles bought the 
water rights of Owens Lake and carried the water away in its aqueduct. The 
ranches where the Indians worked were dried up and abandoned. However, 
Los Angeles has promised the government to remedy this situation. The city 
proposed to take over all the Indian lands, except Fort Independence, which 
is still usable and to give the Indians instead, 1470 acres of the richest land in 
the valley. 

Surprise Valley does not come under the Carson jurisdiction. Some of 
its Indians spill over into the small agency at Summit Lake, Nevada, but 
otherwise for technical reasons, they are cared for by the Sacramento agency 
in California. They have a small reservation at Fort Bidwell but otherwise 
this remote group is camping near the White settlements and making the 
change to the new life in its own way. 

We have followed these two groups of Paiute, with a number of others 
in the background, from the days when they made their living from the coun¬ 
try, with hard work and primitive tools, through the time of dispossession, 
fighting, dreaming, to the time when they are being helped to self support on 
a different level. What change does this mean in their own plan of living? 

In the first place, they are beginning to work together in large groups. 
This is not entirely new, since the men worked together in hunting, even 
though each woman had to pick her seeds alone, for fear there would not be 
enough. They must learn which kind of farming is best for their part of the 
country. They have government experts to help them and these workers have 
declared that the Basin is cattle country. Even irrigation will not allow a 
rancher to raise many crops and he had better devote his land to alfalfa that 
will feed his animals through the bad season. It is also good turkey country. 
Many families are already raising turkeys for sale and their product is pro¬ 
nounced as good as any in the state. 

There is a future for the Paiute cattle and poultryman. He can no 
longer wander because ranches have filled up the empty country. Then let him 
become a rancher. Cattle have eaten the old seed plants so that he can not use 
them for food. Then let him raise cattle. This he is beginning to do, with gov¬ 
ernment help, and so will come a new phase of his outdoor living, tuned to 
modern conditions. 


65 



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SHORT LIST OF READINGS ON THE 
NORTHERN PAIUTE 

GENERAL DESCRIPTIONS 

Kelly, Isabel T. 

Ethnography of the Surprise Valley Paiute. 

University of California Publications in Archaeology and 
Ethnology. Vol. 31, No. 3, 1932 

Lowie, Robert H. 

The Northern Shoshone —-American Museum of Natural History, 

New York—Anthropological Papers, Vol. II, Part 2. 

Notes on Shoshonean Ethnography—American Museum of Natural 
History, New York—Anthropological Paper, Vol. XX. 

Brief scientific notes with good illustrations. 

Steward, Julian 

Ethnography of the Owens Valley Paiute. 

U. of C. Publications, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1933 

Both the above are scientific descriptions, with specially full details as to handicraft, 
games and the use of plants. 

Curtis, E. S. 

The North American Indian. Vols. 15 and 16. Norwood, Mass. 

An interesting, rather popular description, with beautiful photographs. 

SPECIAL DESCRIPTIONS 

Culin, Stewart 

Games of the North American Indians. 

Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Vol. 24, 1902-3 

The pages on Paiute games give accurate directions, with cuts. 

Park, Willard Z. 

Shamanism in Western North America. 

Northwestern University, Evanston, III. 1938 

A scientific account of medicine man's practices with full descriptions and much 
comparative material. 

Park, Willard Z. and others 

Tribal Distributions in the Great Basin. 

American Anthropologist, Vol. 40, No. 4, Pt. 1, 1938 

A short article, with full geographic details, for those interested in the exact location 
of Paiute groups. 


67 


Steward, Julian 

Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Socio-Political Groups. 

Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, No. 120, 1938 

A special study for those interested in primitive organization. 

Moony, James 

Local History. 

The Ghost Dance Religion, Report Bureau American Ethnology, 
No. 14, Pt. 2, 1896 

Chalfant, Guy 

The Story of Inyo. 

1922, privately printed. (Sometimes available in libraries) 
Hopkins, Sara Winnemucca 

Life Among the Paiutes, Their Wrongs and Claims. 

1833, privately printed. (Sometimes available in libraries.) 

MYTHOLOGY 


Steward, Julian 

Myths of the Owens Valley Paiute. 

California Publications, etc., Vol. 34, 1936 

Kelly, Isabel T. 

Northern Paiute Tales. 

Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 51, No. 202, 1938 

Spair, Edward 

Song Recitative in Paiute Mythology. 

Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 23, Oct.-Dec. 1910 

LANGUAGE 


Spair, Edward 

Southern Paiute, a Shoshonean Language. 

American Academy of Arts and Science, Vol. 65, 1931 


68 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


Plate Page 

1. Map showing distribution of the Paiute. 5 

2. Hafted stone ax. 9 

3. Winter home. The sweat house was on the same plan but larger. 11 

4. Cross section of the Paiute summer house or, on a smaller scale, 

of the sweat house. 12 

5. House covered with cattail mats. 12 

6. Summer shack. r . 13 

7. Man in buckskin breechcloth and sagebrush bark sandals; the 

woman in sagebrush skirt, her chin tattooed. The oldest form of 
costume. . 14 

8. Paiute man and woman in fringed buckskin, the later form of 

costume. 15 

9. Paiute woman gathering wild seeds. 17 

10. Woman winnowing seeds under the arbor outside her home. 19 

11. Gathering pine nuts. 20 

12. Paiute rabbit hunt. 22 

13. Raft of reeds for hunting ducks. 24 

14. Left to right, twined seed beater, twined burden basket, and 

twined seed beater or fish scoop. 24 

15. Left to right, coiled basket dish, coiled boiling basket, and coiled 

dish. 25 

16. Left to right, twined water bottle lined with pine pitch to make it 

water tight, twined grater, and twined winnowing tray. 26 

17. Left, coiling in process. Right, twining in process. 27 

18. Left to right, basket cap, coiled basket dish, and backet cap. 28 

19. Left to right, water bottle covered with pine pitch, twined carrying 

basket, for roots and large objects, and twined ladle. 29 

i * 


69 




















20. Cradle boards. Left to right, for a girl (zig-zag decorations on hood), 

buckskin covered board as made in the north, and board for a boy 
(parallel stripes on hood). 30 

21. Left, a loom for rabbitskin blanket with horizontal warp. Right, 

another form of blanket loom. 31 

22. Twining a rabbitskin blanket with vertical warp.. 32 

23. Tools for cleaning and scraping skins...... 34 

24. Paiute woman wringing out a hide. 34 

25. Owens Valley pottery. 35 

26. Women playing shinny...... 38 

27. Woman with tattooed face. 39 

28. Left, counters for scoring in games. Right, stick dice. 40 

29. Left, deer hoof rattle. Right, flute..... 41 

30. Paiute dance corral.... . 42 

31. Snowshoe...... 44 

32. Man wearing rabbitskin blanket..... 54 

33. Map showing Indian reservations in Nevada today for the Washoe, 

Shoshone and Paiute Indians... 61 

34. A Paiute Indian woman of Moapa Reservation who still earns part 
of her living making the baskets traditional with her tribe. In the 
picture are the conical burden basket, the pitch-covered water bot¬ 
tle and the winnower on which she is working. These baskets are 

of willow, witn coarse weave, and no design... 62 

35. Indian cattle men of Pyramid Lake Reservation. A4uch of the Indian 

land of Nevada is chiefly suitable for range livestock. Indian cattle 
cooperatives are being formed tor the economics exploitation of this 
resource. 64 

36. Many Indians make part of their livelihood working in the fields 

White farmers. This scene in the radish fields near the Moapa 
Reservation is typical of the modern transient field work. 66 

37. A successful cattle project is dependent upon the production of 
winter feed to keep the cattle alive when the ground is covered 
with snow. At Fort McDermitt, this group of Indians is engaged in 

a cooperative haying enterprise in anticipation of winter needs.72 


70 


R D 1 4. 8 




















INDIAN LIFE AND CUSTOMS BOOKS 


This is the first of a series of publications describing the life and cus¬ 
toms of the Indians of the American southwest before they were greatly 
changed through contact with Whites. The need for these books was demon¬ 
strated in the course of a summer school in anthropology conducted by 
Dr. Ruth Underhill at Sherman Institute in 1935 at the invitation of Superin¬ 
tendent Donald H. Biery. Not only were the summer school classes well at¬ 
tended but in the months which followed Dr. Underhill received many requests 
for printed material about the tribes which had been the subject for her 
courses. As there was nothing in print to satisfy this evident need, Dr. Under¬ 
hill prepared a series of short mimeographed summaries which were distri¬ 
buted by Sherman Institute. Several editions in mimeographed form were 
exhausted, demonstrating a continued need for the material in more perma¬ 
nent form. 

Each of the original books has been completely rewritten and illustra¬ 
ted by photographs drawn from the collections of the larger museums inter¬ 
ested in southwest artifacts, and by drawings when photographs could not be 
obtained. The drawings are by Velino Herrera, a Pueblo artist, trained at the 
Santa Fe Indian School. In undertaking to reconstruct with reasonable accuracy 
scenes from a prehistoric culture the artist encountered problems quite distinct 
from any he had previously met and his drawings should be judged as illustra¬ 
tions rather than fine art. 

In preparing and revising her material Dr. Underhill has had the gen¬ 
erous cooperation of scientists from the Bureau of American Ethnology, and 
the National Museum, Washington, D. C., the Southwest Museum, Los An¬ 
geles, the Art Museum, Los Angeles, the Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa 
Fe, and the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation), New York 
City. 


These publications are issued in this more permanent form to aid Indi¬ 
an Bureau employees in greater understanding of the tribal groups with which 
they work, for use as text material in the teaching of Indian history and cul¬ 
ture in Indian Bureau junior and senior high schools, and for general distribu¬ 
tion to those interested in Indians. 


Willard W. Beatty 


71 



Plate 37. A successful cattle project is dependent upon the production of winder feed to keep the cattle alive when the ground is covered with snow. At Fort 

McDermitt, this group of Indians is engaged in a cooperative haying enterprise in anticipation of winter needs. 













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